Lauren has covered the Google antitrust trials for several years now, and when we got in touch last Friday, I was struck by how she described the government’s case against Google as completely within pre-Trump legal norms. Over the past four years, the majority of the case had been prosecuted by Biden-era appointees, and although Trump’s DOJ has taken a decidedly unconstitutional direction, Lauren found it “remarkable that the arguments in these two Google cases have remained pretty consistent.”
The ad tech trial wrapped on Monday afternoon, and final arguments are scheduled for November — and if things in the Department of Justice remain consistent and normal, here’s how bad it could get for Google.
Tina Nguyen: Let’s lay out the stakes here for Google in both of these cases. Why are these lawsuits important to Google?
Lauren Feiner: The search case is really at the heart of Google's business and what everyone thinks about when they think about Google, and it’s the case that’s really gotten the most attention between the two. It’s obviously very significant to Google how it keeps users using its search engine, especially amid the shift to AI and more agentic searching. I think the ad tech case has maybe received less attention in part because of how technical it is. It's really in the weeds. But ad tech is an important part of Google's business. I think it’s a really interesting case in how it demonstrates the ways that the court found Google basically used its dominance in different parts of the market to continue its monopoly.
So everyone knows Google search, but the ad tech side is an equally important way for Google to bring in revenue, correct?
I probably need to look at the numbers, and maybe you'd want to check the revenue that Google reported in these areas. But it's a little complicated because we're talking about a segment of Google's advertising business here, where it's specifically about ad tech that serves the open web and open web display ads, which are the ads that oftentimes appear on the top or sides of publisher websites. “Open web,” meaning they're not in what we call walled gardens of a platform.
I think it's also interesting in terms of the effect that this case has on the role Google plays in other industries, too. The open web display ads are really an important part of publisher revenue. So publishers that range from independent, small businesses or blogs to large publishers like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal — I think it's just important to keep in mind that this is the way that a lot of journalism is funded. It's a dwindling way at this point where we're facing the changes that come with AI, but it's still a very important source of revenue.
The search case started during Trump One, but it kept going during the Biden administration, which also picked up the ad tech case. Now they’re continuing to go forward under Trump Two. Have there been any dramatic changes in the DOJ’s approaches to these lawsuits in the new administration?
It’s a good question, especially considering the upheaval that we saw in the DOJ antitrust division earlier this year when two top deputies at the division were fired after a deal came together in a merger that looked a bit fishy to people observing from the outside. But that said, I think it's pretty remarkable that the arguments in these two Google cases have remained pretty consistent. When the second Trump administration took over the Google search case, they made some relatively minor tweaks to the remedies proposals that the Biden administration had made. But in the ad tech remedies case, I haven't noticed a huge difference. It's the same litigation team, more or less, than was there in the liability trial. So I think we actually see a remarkable consistency across the cases.
One of the things I was told in reporting out this current article is that there are still active threats on the table for even more antitrust investigations from the DOJ or the FTC because they hate Google a lot. Have you been hearing anything along those lines or any other possible approaches to breaking up Google?
In terms of antitrust, I think the DOJ and FTC both have a lot on their plates right now when it comes to tech. They have either a lawsuit or active trial against all four of the big tech companies right now. So I think part of the question moving forward is: What are they going to keep fighting that’s already been set in motion? And how aggressively do they push on the tech companies? We saw a settlement in the Amazon Prime case last month, but that's a different case because it's a consumer protection case, not an antitrust case. But after what we saw in the antitrust division earlier this year, it raised a lot of questions about how those cases will be handled and how settlements will be handled. But ultimately, it feels like these are perhaps such big and high-profile cases that they wouldn't go away quietly.
Have you seen Trump himself weighing in on any of these cases? Because the interesting thing I realized about Meta and YouTube’s settlements with Trump was that these were both private cases that had been filed against these companies back when he was a private citizen, and then he was earmarking all of these funds to his vanity projects. But the logic that I had been hearing behind the scenes was that these companies hoped by appealing to Trump's vanity, they would get him to overrule the actions being taken by the DOJ or prevent any further ones. You said they haven't really manifested yet, but have you seen Trump make comments along those lines?
I don't think we've seen a lot of direct comments from him yet in terms of these particular cases. He did make a comment recently about thinking about breaking up Nvidia and considering what that would be like, and then it seemed like some adviser had basically talked him out of that, and he realized what a great company Nvidia is and what a great CEO Jensen Huang is. Trump is someone who seems very persuaded by some of these personal relationships that he has with people and understanding when he talks to a CEO himself and getting his own sense for that situation.
That was a reason why a lot of people who supported the FTC's case against Meta were really concerned when he met with Mark Zuckerberg right before that trial. But obviously, there wasn't a settlement in that case before the trial, and presumably, we'll get a ruling from that judge. So far, I think in terms of what we've actually seen from Trump is a willingness to continue these cases, but there remains a question of whether that'll change.
What's something you think has been underappreciated in the general coverage of this trial and the general overall sentiment for breaking up Google?
As I've been sitting in court the past week listening to Google’s defense against a breakup, it's often easy to lose track of the fact that Google already lost the liability phase of this trial. What we're really trying to understand now is how much, more or less, it might lose in terms of the actual business.
They're obviously not trying to completely relitigate the liability findings, and they’ll have a chance to appeal after the remedies ruling comes out. But I think in the course of their arguments, there's still a sense from some of the Google executives that they’re proud of the products they built, and that they want to have their products used to help publishers. As I listen to that, I also have to remind myself that the judge they're talking to already found that Google wielded those very products in ways that ultimately harmed publishers.
During this trial, you also saw CEOs from other companies testify against Google and talk about how their anti-competitive practices hurt their businesses. But then you also heard executives from OpenAI going like, Yeah, if Chrome's for sale, I would totally buy it. How much do you think their appearances were calibrated toward trying to get a piece of Google?
One thing that stood out is how much the CEOs testifying in this trial are very much not clamoring over buying Google's ad tech tools the way that CEOs in the search remedies trial were clamoring to buy Chrome. It seems like maybe there's a little bit of coyness in this case because it's not well-defined what these assets could really be. But I think it's also a function of the role that Chrome plays in the broader internet and how important it could be to the future of how we find information online, whether that's through traditional search or with AI search. In this case, part of what Google has brought up is how open web display advertising hasn’t been growing at the rate that other advertising formats have. So maybe that's part of the reason we're not seeing the enthusiasm that we saw in the search case for Chrome.
But getting a piece of Google is a very valuable thing for any company. I think it's undisputed in these cases that Google is a company with great engineering talent and makes really solid products. That's something a lot of companies are definitely interested in, and it raises this whole new question: What will be the next iteration of who’s in charge of these really important products on the web? And does that create a whole new host of problems or not?
