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cailianshe news, september 14 (editor: zhou ziyi)in the u.s. department of justice's antitrust trial against google, a former facebook advertising executive testified that even facebook cannot successfully compete with google because of google's monopoly on online advertising technology.

in addition, the executive also revealed a secret agreement reached between facebook's parent company meta and google in 2018 (facebook had not yet been renamed meta at that time).

brian boland, who oversaw facebook’s advertising technology from 2009 to 2019, told a virginia federal court that the social network initially sought to directly challenge google in the advertising market through its facebook audience network platform.

audience network is an advertising service product of facebook that allows advertisers not only to run ads on facebook or instagram, but also to display ads on third-party apps and websites outside of facebook.

but by 2017, facebook “gave up the fight” and concluded it was too difficult to compete effectively with google because of its monopoly and the search giant’s dominance in advertising tools, which boland noted gave it “the opportunity to cherry-pick the best products.”

secret agreement

boland told virginia federal court judge leonie brinkema that google's ad exchange was like a box where google was able to pick out the 30 best apples before anyone else had a chance to buy them, leaving only the rotten apples in the box.

boland also revealed a secret clause signed between facebook and google, which boland participated in throughout a six-month negotiation between facebook and google, which culminated in a 2018 agreement, knowing that they could not effectively compete.

the agreement, known internally as "jedi blue," gives facebook priority treatment when bidding on google's audience network ads through the company's exchange.

the agreement, officially known as the "network bidding agreement," was approved at the highest levels of both companies and was personally signed by facebook ceo mark zuckerberg and google ceo sundar pichai.

interestingly, the deal seems to have never been put on the table. google and facebook are the first and second largest players in the online advertising market, respectively. the specific details of the deal were still not disclosed in the court testimony on friday. the court document only showed that "google wants facebook to pay it 15% of the effective media cost."

earlier in 2020, some state attorneys general sued google for allegedly monopolizing the advertising technology market and claimed that the agreement between the two companies violated antitrust laws. the attorneys general claimed that google proposed the deal to facebook in order to prevent facebook from adopting a new technology that would weaken google's monopoly. subsequently, a new york judge dismissed the allegations, saying that there was nothing wrong with the reasons for the two companies to reach an agreement.

european antitrust enforcement agencies also investigated the deal, concluding the investigation in march 2022 without taking any action.

moreover, when the u.s. department of justice sued google last year for monopolizing the ad tech market, they did not allege that the agreement was anti-competitive, but rather emphasized that even a tech giant the size of meta could not compete.

other evidence

in addition to boland, several other corporate executives have testified in the antitrust investigation of google.

recently, stephanie layser, a former news corp executive, pointed out that in 2017, news corp had estimated that if it gave up cooperating with google's advertising agencies and was no longer subject to google's rules and regulations, news corp would lose at least $9 million in advertising revenue that year.

she believes that google's advertising business benefits it more, but hurts publishers. almost no one in the industry uses other products because google's publisher ad server is tied to google's ad exchange platform.

layser stressed that by the time she left, about 70-80% of news corp.'s advertising transactions were conducted through google's advertising platform. but google argued that this data is outdated and that large publishers now have six different platforms to sell ads and more than 80 related services.

tim wolfe, an advertising executive at gannett, the largest newspaper group in the united states, also testified that gannett has been using google's ad server for about 13 years and has never found any other realistic alternatives.

in addition, employees from companies such as trade desk, comcast and pubmatic are also on the list of possible witnesses, and there are more than two dozen current or former google employees waiting to be "summoned."