The scheme, dubbed “Project Bernanke,” was not made public to advertisers, who sold advertising via Google’s ad-buying programmes. According to the papers, it provided hundreds of millions of dollars in sales for the organisation each year. Texas claims in its case, that the project provided Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., with an undue comparative advantage over competitors.
The papers submitted this week were part of Google’s initial response to the Texas-led antitrust case, which accused the search giant, of operating a digital-ad cartel that affected both, ad-industry rivals and publishers. When this week’s filing was submitted to the court’s public docket, it was not properly redacted.l. A federal judge granted Google permission to re-file it under seal.
Any of the document’s unredacted contents were previously revealed by MLex, an antitrust-focused news source. The paper expands on the state’s case against Google as well as the search company’s defence.
Most of the lawsuit revolves around Google’s positions as both, the director of a global ad exchange (which Google compares to the New York Stock Exchange in marketing materials) and a representative of buyers and sellers on the exchange. Google also serves as an ad buyer on its own right, distributing advertising through these same networks on its own properties such as search and YouTube.
Texas claims that Google used its access to data from publishers’ ad servers—more than 90% of major publishers use Google to sell digital ad space—to direct marketers against the amount they will have to pay to win an ad placement.
Texas also claims that Google’s use of auction secrets led to insider dealing in digital-ad markets. According to the state, since Google had proprietary knowledge of what other ad buyers were able to spend, it could bargain disproportionately with competing ad-buying tools and pay publishers less for its winning offers for ad inventory.
According to the unredacted papers, Texas believes Project Bernanke is a vital component of that initiative.
In its response, Google admitted the presence of Project Bernanke and stated in the filing that “the specifics of Project Bernanke’s activities are not revealed to publishers.”
In the papers, Google denied that there was anything wrong with using the exclusive details it had to notify bids, calling it “comparable to data maintained by other purchasing tools.”
A Google spokesperson, Peter Schottenfels, said that the lawsuit “misrepresents many facets of our ad tech market.” “We are excited to present our case in court.” He pointed the Journal to a study commissioned by a UK regulator, which found that Google did not seem to have a competitive edge.
According to the filing, Project Bernanke used past bid data from Google Ads to change its clients’ offers and boost their odds of winning auctions for ad views that would have otherwise been won by competing ad tools. The corporation accepted as true an internal 2013 presentation indicating that the project was supposed to raise $230 million in sales that year; Texas has quoted the presentation as evidence that Google gained from its advantage.
The paper also shines more light on Jedi Blue, a once-secret agreement between Facebook Inc. and Google, that supposedly promised Facebook will bid in—and win—a set share of ad auctions.
According to an unredacted portion of Google’s filing, the deal was signed by Philipp Schindler, Google’s senior vice president and chief business officer, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief executive officer.
In its answers, Google admitted that it had promised to make “commercially fair efforts” to guarantee that Facebook will recognise 80 percent of smartphone users and 60 percent of laptop users in ad auctions, except users of Apple’s Safari web browser. According to the Texas lawsuit, this practise tends to “allow Facebook to bid and win more often in auctions.”
Facebook did not immediately react to the latest information included in the papers. The corporation has stated that it does not think it was treated differently from other Google partners.
