AAI’s Kathleen Bradish Discusses Landmark Decision in Google Ad Tech Case

AAI’s Vice President and Director of Legal Advocacy, Kathleen Bradish, spoke on the panel entitled, The DOJ v. Google Ad Tech Decision: Did the Court Get It Right?, at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. From the panel description:

U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema has issued her ruling in the landmark DOJ v. Google ad tech case. In a much-anticipated decision, she found that Google monopolized both the ad exchange market and the ad server market—representing the DOJ’s second major antitrust win against Google in less than a year.

The judgment comes just days before the remedies trial in the search case begins, where the DOJ is pursuing extensive relief, including a potential breakup of the company. As with search, the ad tech ruling raises complex factual and legal questions about how antitrust law applies to “Big Tech.”

Did Judge Brinkema unduly limit the relevant markets to “open web display advertising,” or miss the broader platform dynamics of the ad tech space? Were the correct legal standards applied to evaluate Google’s behavior, or were its practices mischaracterized? Was this a pattern of patently anticompetitive behavior by Google, or were there procompetitive justifications that should have been credited?

• Moderator: Lilla Nora Kiss, Senior Policy Analyst, Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy
• Kathleen W. Bradish, Vice President and Director of Legal Advocacy, American Antitrust Institute
• Joseph Coniglio, Director, Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
• Erik Hovenkamp, Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
• John Yun, Associate Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University