DOJ accuses Google of knowingly taking power from publishers as government enters emails and audio as evidence

On Thursday in federal court, the U.S. Justice Department introduced internal Google documents — including emails, chat logs and audio recordings — that showed Google execs’ plans around the introduction of new publisher tools to compete with header bidding.

Evidence submitted by the DOJ suggests Google knew about industry unease over the evolution of DoubleClick — Google’s publisher platform in question as part of the antitrust trial — but continued on its path to monetization anyway and even took measures to allegedly thwart efforts to side-step its control. Documents also gave a behind-the-scenes look at how Google execs understood why publishers wanted to diversify revenue away from the Google-controlled advertising waterfall and employ rival monetization technology header bidding instead.

One of the DOJ’s witnesses for Day 4 was former Googler Rahul Srinivasan, who at the time was product manager for Google Ad Manager between 2016 and 2019. Srinivasan discussed the rollout of various features within Google Ad Manager, such as a move to a first price auction, removal of publishers’ Last Look, and the introduction of Unified Pricing Rules (UPR).

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