Ex-Google Exec Admits Aim Was To ‘Crush’ Competition

For a company that is being accused of anticompetitive behaviour by courts in several jurisdictions globally including Australia, the EU and the US, the latest revelations by a former Google executive about the company’s approach to dealing with competition is a further blow to its reputation.

Back in 2009, a Google executive told colleagues that the goal for the company’s then-nascent online advertising business was to “crush” rival advertising networks, according to evidence prosecutors have presented at the company’s antitrust trial in the US this week.

Alphabet’s Google headed to court at the start of this week to face US Justice Department allegations that it manipulates the $677 billion (A$1014.22 billion) display advertising market in violation of antitrust laws.

On Wednesday, prosecutors introduced evidence of how Google employees thought about the company’s products.

“We’ll be able to crush the other networks and that’s our goal,” David Rosenblatt, Google’s former president of display advertising, said of the company’s strategy in late 2008 or early 2009, according to notes shown in court, reported Reuters.

Rosenblatt arrived at Google in 2008 when it acquired his former ad tech company, DoubleClick, and left the following year. The notes of his talk showed him discussing the advantages of owning technology on both sides and the middle of the market. “We’re both Goldman and NYSE,” he said, he said, according to the notes.

“Google has created what’s comparable to the NYSE or London Stock Exchange; in other words, we’ll do to display what Google did to search,” Rosenblatt said.

By owning publisher ad servers, the advertiser ad network would have a “first look” at available spots for ads, he said according to the notes. He also said it was a “nightmare” for publishers to switch platforms.

“It takes an act of God to do it,” he said, according to the notes.

Brad Bender, another former DoubleClick executive, who worked at Google until 2022, testified at trial that he forwarded the notes to his team, calling them a “worthwhile read” at the time.

Of Alphabet’s nearly $260 billion (A$389.51 billion) in revenue in 2023, about $31.3 billion (A$46.89 billion) came from display advertising.

Google has denied the allegations instead arguing that it faces fierce competition from rival digital advertising companies, and says that others including Microsoft, Amazon and Meta Platforms offer an integrated suite of products for advertisers and publishers too.

There’s much at stake in this trial. If US District Judge Leonie Brinkema finds Google has broken the law, she could consider the prosecutors’ request to make Google sell off Google Ad Manager, a platform that includes the company’s publisher ad server and its ad exchange.

Already this week, the EU’s Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg ruled against Google in its bid to overturn a €2.4 billion (A$3.98 billion) EU fine for abusing its monopoly power to crush rival shopping services. The ECJ backed a 2017 decision which found that the US tech giant illegally leveraged its search-engine dominance to give a higher ranking to its own product listings.

In a separate trial from the one that commenced this week in the US, Google is facing a potential breakup of the company after a US court judge ruled recently that it was a monopolist in the internet search engine space too.