The Senate grilled Google exec Donald Harrison last Tuesday about Google's dominance in the digital ad space. This is likely a precursor to arguments the company will soon face from antitrust regulators. The Justice Department and nearly all states' attorney generals are investigating big tech companies and their potentially anti-competitive technologies, and Google's huge search and advertising business are at the center of this investigation. In fact, the Justice Department may be filing a lawsuit against Google in just a few weeks.
Harrison is Google's president of global partnerships and corporate development. He was questioned about the scope and scale of the company's digital ad business. When asked if he knew of "any other company that exercises this kind of concentration and dominance across every layer of the ad stack", Harrison replied that there are other choices besides Google for advertisers and publishers, and that digital advertising prices have dropped in recent years, which shows that there is competition in the space. While Harrison's response may be true, it cannot be overlooked that Google is involved almost every step of the way when advertisers are looking to place their ads and when publishers sell space on their websites.
Senators also asked Harrison about how Google uses the data it gets from other services like search and Gmail in support of its ad business. Harrison echoed his statement that prices have come down, showing there is competition to argue that the market does not require regulation to avoid conflicts of interest and trading on insider information.
The antitrust case against Google that is approaching is part of a broader question of whether big tech companies in general are stifling competition and hurting consumers. The CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Apple have already once testified in front of a House committee back in July, where they argued against the notion that these companies hold too high a concentration of power.
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