Google and antitrust regulators are facing off in federal court over allegations that the tech giant built up an illegal monopoly of the $300 billion US digital-advertising market.
The antitrust trial, which could result in a breakup of the internet behemoth, officially opened Monday in Alexandria, Virginia.
On Sunday, before the trial kicked off, Google's vice president for regulatory affairs said in a blog post that the Department of Justice — which sued the company last year for its dominance over digital-advertising technologies — had it all wrong.
"The DOJ's narrow view of the ad tech market doesn't reflect reality," Lee-Anne Mulholland wrote. "We are one of hundreds of companies who actively compete to enable the placement of ads across the internet."
Mulholland said Google intended to show in court that the buyers and sellers of ads have "many options" and choose to use its adtech because it's "simple, affordable, and effective."
"By picking winners and losers in a highly competitive industry, the DOJ risks making it more expensive for small businesses to grow and for websites and apps to make money. Let's not break what's working," Mulholland wrote.
"The DOJ's case," Mulholland added, "risks inefficiencies and higher prices — the last thing that America's economy or our small businesses need right now."
Google's lawyer Karen Dunn said the government's case relied on an outdated view of the internet from when desktop browsing on the World Wide Web was the norm.
The case zooms in on the "open web display" ad market, where banner ads are bought and sold in the milliseconds it takes for a webpage to load. Within this market, Google owns an ad server that publishers use to manage their ad space, buying tools that let advertisers purchase ads, and an ad exchange that connects the two. It owns the most popular of all three technologies, which the DOJ alleges helped the company impede rivals, inflate advertising costs, and reduce revenue for publishers.
In an opening statement Monday, Julia Tarver Wood, a DOJ lawyer, told the court, "It's worth saying the quiet part out loud."
"One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here," she said, according to The Associated Press.
The case doesn't look at the broader digital-marketing ecosystem, such as ads on connected TVs or social media, the latter of which usually need to be bought directly from the platforms themselves rather than via adtech middlemen.
She added that any move against Google wouldn't help small businesses but instead let other tech giants, like Amazon, Microsoft, and TikTok, reign.
The case, in which US District Judge Leonie Brinkema will decide whether Google violated antitrust laws, is set to last several weeks.
Google will likely appeal if the judge doesn't rule in its favor, meaning it could be months before the real ramifications of the case are known.
