Brattle Team Provides Analyses and Supports Several DOJ Experts in US v. Google Antitrust Case

In United States of America, et al. v. Google LLC, Brattle provided economic analyses, and Brattle Principal Adoria Lim submitted expert reports, on behalf of the US Department of Justice (DOJ), which alleged that the tech giant held an illegal monopoly in digital advertising technology (ad tech).

The DOJ’s Antitrust Division retained Brattle to support six experts: two industry experts (Professors R. Ravi and Gabriel Weintraub), two damages experts (Ms. Lim and Professor Timothy Simcoe), a survey expert (Professor Wayne Hoyer), and a marketing expert (Professor Ken Wilbur). During the three-week trial in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Professors Ravi, Weintraub, and Simcoe testified.

• Professor Ravi, the Andris A. Zoltners Professor of Business at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, used his expertise in computer science and discrete optimization to analyze key aspects of how Google conducted auctions for ad space. He testified about the impact of Google’s auction designs on its advertising and publisher clients, the broader ad tech industry, and Google itself. He also explained how scale affects ad tech firms’ ability to attract customers and influences the performance of optimization algorithms.
• Professor Weintraub, the Amman Mineral Professor of Operations, Information & Technology at Stanford Graduate School of Business, provided testimony on the competitive importance of scale in the ad tech industry. He quantified the effect of Google’s conduct on the scale of rival ad tech firms using results from Google’s internal A/B tests and multiple data sources produced by the tech giant and third parties, and also described how the reduction in scale impaired rivals’ ability to compete.
• Professor Simcoe, the David J McGrath Jr. Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, offered testimony on the extent to which Google’s exclusionary conduct in the ad tech sector harmed its advertiser and publisher customers. He explained how Google’s fees for its ad exchange product functioned like a tax on the sale of ad space, raising the prices advertisers pay publishers while simultaneously reducing the after-tax revenue for publishers. Additionally, Professor Simcoe estimated the total overcharge imposed by Google for its ad exchange product and apportioned that overcharge between Google’s advertiser and publisher customers.

Closing arguments in the case were delivered at the end of November 2024, and a decision is expected by early 2025.