"While we are waiting for the final decision from Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia, I want to present some thoughts on the least resolved of the case's many issues, the hard parts the judge will be pondering. Actually, one hard part: trust. But I need to tell you a little about the case to make the trust issue clear."
"The ad tech trial is the third of three cases in which Google was accused of illegal monopolization, all of which Google lost. The first (brought by Epic Games) was for monopolizing the Android app distribution market. The second was for monopolizing internet search. This one, the third, found Google guilty of a series of dirty tricks to monopolize two advertising technology markets: publisher ad servers, and advertising exchanges."
"This case is about advertising technology, and advertising funds our whole digital world. So it is about who controls the flow of money to businesses. But it is also about the big data and technologies that enable advertising to target you so well, so privacy and autonomy, efficiency and manipulation, democracy and political power are all implicated. Then there's artificial intelligence; Google's monopoly on the technologies in this case gives it a big head start in monopolizing AI in coming years."
The Google ad-tech trial determined that Google used deceptive practices to monopolize publisher ad servers and advertising exchanges. The trial followed two earlier monopolization losses involving Android app distribution and internet search. The liability phase found Google guilty; the remedy phase will set penalties and structural changes. Control of ad technology determines the flow of digital advertising revenue and access to massive user data. That control affects privacy, autonomy, efficiency versus manipulation, and political influence. Google's dominance in ad tech also confers an early advantage in developing AI tied to advertising systems. The case raises fundamental questions about the ability of law to constrain the largest corporations.
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