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The CEO of The Trade Desk TTD, a major advertising tech platform, thinks Google GOOGL should get broken up as part of its second major antitrust trial of the year.
Google headed to court Monday to face another Department of Justice lawsuit, this time focusing on its dominance in the advertising market. Federal regulators are honing in on Google’s adtech stack, specifically its Ad Manager, the platform that helps publishers and advertisers manage and buy and sell advertising on sites.
In January 2023, the Justice Department sued Google, alleging that the tech giant engaged in “anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.” As of 2022, the Justice Department estimated that Google’s share of the adtech market was between 40% and 90%.
Jeff Green, CEO of the Trade Desk, one of Google’s largest adtech competitors with a $50 billion market capitalization, said at a conference Wednesday that it’s time for Google to loosen its grasp on the ad market, reported Business Insider.
“They have been the prosecuting attorney, the defense attorney, and the judge and the jury,” Green said. “The remedy is to say you have to quit at least one of those jobs: You can’t be all three.”
Green suggested that under the analogy, the judge and jury — in this case, its ad exchange AdX — would be the least costly to give up. If Google is found to be running an illegal monopoly, it could most reasonably spin off its AdX business.
Last week, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the United Kingdom’s leading antitrust regulator, provisionally said it believes Google is using “anti-competitive practices” in its open-display adtech. The agency cited Google’s dominance in the space and preference of its own ad exchange.
“Whether it’s because Google is afraid of having to go through this again — the CMA is watching, there are regulators all over the world watching this, and they are not done yet,” Green noted.
In August, Google lost the biggest antitrust trial in decades after a federal judge ruled that Google monopolized the online search engine market. The Department of Justice was also weighing whether it would be appropriate to break up Google in that case.
As a result of the growing antitrust scrutiny and questioning over Google’s dominant position in a number of digital sectors, Green is hopeful that Google will change its ways.
“I do believe that Google’s behavior is going to change and the market will get fairer,” Green said. “I’ve always said The Trade Desk managed to win in an unfair market — imagine what we could do in a fair market.”
Still, analysts at investment firm Wedbush have said the impact of Google’s divestiture from its Google Ad Manager business will be “minimal.”