Also media.
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zitron. Once again, we are here to talk about the Department of Justices case against Google Ads. Today, of course, I'm joined by Jason Kint, the CEO of DCN. We've got a special guest as well, Ariel Garcia, director of Intelligence to ad Transparency nonprofit Check My Ads. Ariel, Jason, thank you so much for joining me, Thanks for having us. Likewise, so Aria, why don't you tell me a little bit
about the end of the Department of Justices case. Anything fun, interesting or scandalous happened in the last week.
Yeah, I will say it was definitely a markedly slower week than it was last week. A lot of the testimony that we heard was simply for the purpose of getting exhibits into evidence, but there were a couple of things that stood out. We started the week with Neil Mohan and the big revelation.
There who is Neil Mohan?
Well, he is now CEO of YouTube, but he came over with the Double Click acquisition, and so what one of the big focus areas of his testimony was about the ad meld Yield Manager acquisition, and we saw internal decks where they were discussing whether or not to purchase and a yield manager.
And what does that mean as well?
So it basically helped publishers optimize yield. Jason, you can probably add more color to this than I can. Like, Okay, now there is one important point. There's two kind of component functionalities that ad meld had. One was the yield management functionality and the other was real time bidding, right.
And just clear, yield management is managing the amount of money you make from your ads.
Yeah, it is. Like I said, I'm not on the publisher side, so I don't know that I've never worked in one, but I can I can certainly talk Google ads. But anyway, what Google did when it ultimately did buy ad meld was kill the real time bidding bit. But we'll get to that. So we see a deck where they're debating whether a yield manager would be a good investment to make, and it says in the deck that
their tech is irrelevant to Google. And then we see that they paid I don't remember the exact number, but I think it was like one hundred million over the valuation. And before that, we see an internal exchange where Neil says something to the effect of, well, we could just buy it and park it somewhere. So they were upset
that yield managers were starting to gain traction. It ran the risk of disintermediating DFP, and obviously that would cause risk to revenue through add X, which was very, very profitable for them.
So just break it down in simple terms for a simpleton talking about myself here. So by killing off this product, this yield management company, it means that they would stop people being able to optimize how much they make. What are the ramifications of doing this.
Well, remember that it came with the real time bidding functionality as well. So what this was really about was two things. It was to again protect their addex revenue, but also to make sure that DFPS that double click for publishers stays critical. And so what they did was they took it in. They built in some of the
core yield management functionality into DFP. They integrated that, but they got rid of real time bidding so that they can keep you know, restricting and setting the rules for the auction on their side.
Oh, so they deliberately killed a useful product that they owned as a means of as a means of making the product worse so that they would make more money.
And they didn't kill it, they parked it. And then we had Neil try to explain that park didn't really mean what we all thought it meant. It just right to continue to operate it status quo for now.
That classic word park that I use to refer to operating something and using it. That's why it's called the car park, and you drive on it exactly.
It's like, so we hear something else very similar. While we're on that topic. The other one of the other spicy things that happened was we heard from Jonathan Bellach yesterday. He's another longtime now ex Google employee that came over with the Double Click acquisition, and with him they were talking about exchange bidding, which was basically the product that
Google launched to kill header bidding. And we see an email about how their goal is to make exchange bidding slightly better than header bidding.
So the deoder bidding is the open source at network approach.
That's correct, so well, not add network, but like header bidding rapper, it allows them to bid without like Google getting first looked. It enabled a fair auction, right.
Oh, Google will never have that then.
So what we see is that their goal was to roll out a exchange bidding so that it's slightly better than header bidding, and the DOJ asks, Uh, Bellak, why
slightly better? And he explains the context as his goal was for his team to roll out a product that is as much better than header bidding as possible, but the direction from leadership was to scale it back to only slightly better, And the DOJ asked him why that is is it was it because they wanted to protect the ad X revenue and he said something to the effect of you're gonna have to ask leadership about that. So that was another interesting one, right about how they
like intentionally. Oh and by this point they also mentioned that header bidding innovation had continued and so by this point exchange bidding would be inferior. Right, So that was certainly interesting and also told like a bit of a more nuanced story about the fact that even if the product organization wanted to do right by their publisher customers, they were hamstrung by leadership.
That's very good. I think that's what we say. It does feel like this. I don't think there's any open and shotcase and anything like this. But it does feel like Google's egregiously taken the piss in a lot of this, in a lot of these scenarios. That feels like there's been a lot of testimony and discovery that's just them saying, what if we made it so that no one else could do this and we would make more money than them through monopolis, Like it feels almost two on the nose.
Yeah, no, that's fair. And then I'll save my last one big highlight that is one that not too many other people are talking about, so I'm making sure to talk about it all the time. So during Brian o'kelly's deposition tape, he used to be CEO of Upnexus, now
he is CEO of Scope three. During the end of his deposition tape, he talks about how pre Bid, which is the open source thing that we were talking about before kind of pre bid was brought to IAB tech Lab that typically will govern like open source standards and stuff like that. They wanted tech Lab to take over the governance of the pre bid standards and IAB tech Lab rejected it. Why because Google vehemently objected. Obviously they were worried about the thread at post to them, and
so that's why Prebid became its own separate nonprofit. So we also Brian flags that Google at the time at least was the biggest financial contributor to IAB.
And what is IAB just for the.
Listeners Interactive Advertising Bureau. The tech Lab is a separate entity. To be clear, there is some overlapping governance, but I just don't I know that there will be a barrage of people that say they're separate. So I am acknowledging they are separate entities, but there is overlapping governance. The IAB Tech Lab has a lot of standards, like they have the open RTV standards. IAB itself has its own
standards or frameworks that it oversees. But in terms of like the technical standards, that's that's under the IB tech Lab.
So the the kind of like a professional association for the ADS industry or did you ads?
Yeah, ads, ad tech, etcetera. I mean this one just to jump in this one to be fair, I was I was not in the courtroom when they read this one in when they show this deposition, so I saw the news report on it in at exchange, I think, but you know this is a situation where app Nexus, the largest independent ad tech company out there besides Google at the time, you know, had this open source code that they developed with other players to open up the
auctions and create a fair environment against Google. And the report is and what Brian O'Kelly, the CEO, testified Undrowth is that, yeah, that they had this and they want
to donate it to the industry. Right, So you got this industry association that's supposed to be for the betterment of the entire industry, and one company's interests weighed in heavier than the rest of the entire industry, which is, you know, a very clear symptom of the problem we're talking through in all these lawsuits, right, is that one company's interests outweigh everybody else and they just continue to gain more and more market share. So it's very that's
very concerning. I didn't shed like good light on IAB either, frankly.
So it feels like we are at this point in the ads industry where things are. If Google is broken up in the way they're suggesting, it's going to have more ramifications than just for Google. It feels like there are organizational shifts that will have to happen as a result. That's right, those who have aligned with them at.
Least, that's right. And I think in a moment like this, because we are geting you this moment frankly between the search opinion and now this trial where it seems to be headed, sometimes it's hard to think through what this means and the collateral damage, and people worry about the negative, but it also creates a lot of opportunity, right, and so it unlocks and creates oxygen for everybody. And that's that's the that's the fun part.
So have we had anything more about Jedi Blue, Jedi Blue, the Facebook Google deal? The is a big deal or isn't a big deal, depending on who you ask.
I looked at Texas and Q one him next year.
That is that where the suits are happening.
That's where the state ag suit is, and that's where they were able to depose so Narbashi and they were able to depose the Facebook witness. It's come up in a few different ways and its it continues even today where you know where they are trying to bring Facebook in as a competitor in this relevant market that this suits all about. And you start to it's the threat
of Facebook coming into the market. But the rest of that story is that Facebook didn't really come into the market because they had a sweetheart deal with Google to not come into the market, right, And so we're not telling the rest of the story right now, And I think it's because the US Department maybe doesn't need to tell the whole story. They already have enough. But but I don't know if you have a different read aerial.
No, I think that's right. I mean, you're exactly right that it came up like once, But I also agree that's part of the contortion that they're doing. Then the other part of the contortion is still like the market definition contortion. Like just just today, at the very end, and they were they were going through we started to hear from a Microsoft employee Beneezer, I'm bla. I think it was is it Ben Jon? That's it was Ben Jon, And they were talking about how Xander had helped Microsoft
gain a foothold in ad tech. But if you actually read the document's Google was pointing us to, it was talking about how Xander invested in video. So we're still ignoring, we're still ignoring the display market. And they're like systematic control of it. They're just kind of pointing to all of the other areas that that they that they haven't yet taken completely over just yet.
Well that kind of leads us to the next part. So it sounds like that we're recording Friday, September twentye My iPhone has still not arrived. So Google is now on the stand. So walk me through it, jas, wonn't you stont sure?
So they bring up their first witness, who we don't know a lot about because he seems to have disappeared off the internet, but he's been there for nearly two decades and he's one of the few people that didn't leave when the lawsuit was filed. And you know, most of the Google led defense, the Google attorneys were focused on,
I think two things. One was having him draw out on a visual the entire ad tech supply chain and all of Google's components of it, which you know, at first seemed to seem like a good strategy to kind of confuse the room and the judge, but I think at the end of the day it was more annoying, and it actually it just showed that they were all over the entire marketplace, right and so it was just
a lot of smoking mirrors. And then the other piece was to try to bring in this element of all these different products serve other types of advertising, be it video, be it app advertising, be it native advertising in stream, and so all these different things that are not actually part of this case, to try to make advertising a larger market than it really is, to make Google look
less of a major player. Right, so if you can actually bring in Facebook and TikTok, or you can bring in Netflix advertising for video, then suddenly Google's not such a big player, right. But it just didn't It didn't work. And when the Justice Department followed up, they actually just pulled up an email from this witness where he actually went through and talked about their business in those exact ways,
and it really negated everything he had testified. And and you know, there are a couple kind of elements of the judge also seeming to get a little bit annoyed and kind of ready to move on.
So but oh yeah, yeah, it also doesn't seem like their defense is any good. It's really it's just very weird because the Search trial, they were all piss and vinegar, They were like ready to rumble. This one, they're coming in They're like, well, look this is what we got. Our first witness, who you will see has emailed literally what we're going to claim. He isn't saying. It's just weird, like they just seem almost discombobulated.
Yeah, it felt this is their first witness, right, so they needed to start strong. It did not. It was not It wasn't strong. And then I mean towards the end, just to kind of give the highlights, the two things happened one and this is when Google's attorney was up, but she wanted to bring up some more recent things, right like the trade desk one of the companies they compete with their earnings from last month. She wanted to bring up something from the earnings last month, which is,
you know, a year after Discovery had closed. Like this, it's not you know, it's like a very clear objection for the justice.
And that's yeah, that's like something you kind of just kind of.
Keeping like exhibit. It's non exhibit. It's never been you know, asked about, it wasn't part of the deposition. It's literally from a month ago. And they wanted to bring up a deal that they've done with Twitter from the last few months, right, And so the judge was like, you know this stuff is not you know, it's too early. She said something like, plus it's tainted, like once all the lawsuits started being filed, like all this stuff is tainted,
you're giving me And so that was interesting. And then she said, and you're also talking about this entire ad tech ecosystem and that feels more like something for remedies rather than liability. So she was saying, like, let's talk about this when we start to break you up, or.
We won't come back to this.
We'll come back to this when we So everybody in the court kind of looked at each other and made their notes. But I know at the same time, you know, I don't know if that's definitely a leading in care where she's going, but it got our attention.
So have you have you seen anything solid from Google? Like, have they had any wins so far? No?
Like, it sounds like it sounds like I am saying that because I want to believe it and not because no.
No, I truly don't think you like that. I wouldn't bring anyone on who is just like we. I may want them to lose, but I want them to lose properly.
Yeah, no, since sincerely they do not have a strong argument. The fact that their their first witness landed with the judge as though they were trying to basically say, well, wouldn't it be like super complicated to blow us up if that's your best argument, like what you know? And then the fact that that that again first witness, and it felt a little bit like they were resorting to tricks and bringing in documents that weren't part of discovery and that that haven't been asked about. It's not, it
just wasn't. It was not a strong way to start. They also their their ad Tech spaghetti football situation. The d o J went up there and they're like, okay, can.
You explain what that is?
Okay, so it was that was the judge's description. So cool.
So they bring up a gray oval on on the screen, like a ball shaped oval, and then they ask him to start mapping out the ecosystem and he puts they put ad Tech ecosystem at the top. They put like buy side on the right, uh, cell side on the left, and then he starts populating it with with Google products first, and it's all Google products. So it's like okay, like, let's start with search and O and O and then like like they golled ad sense for content, ad sense
for search. They go in order and they explain the history of why they're absolutely everywhere, and then like there's so now by this point and they met they draw lines connecting everything. So at this point it's a mangled mess of Google logos and unnamed alleged competitors Like so it was, Yeah, it was like a big bowl of ad tech spaghetti where Google is the is the meat balls absolutely everywhere and some competitor flex are in there
a seasoning. It was, it was, And then the DOJ gets up and they're like, first of all, we need to preserve this because we're going to come back to it. So they preserve that.
Thank you.
The way the.
Gets up and they're like, okay, so if if if I am a publisher, if I'm Wall Street Journal and i want to sell ad inventory on my website and not and I'm not on my app, right, will search help me do that? We'll ad center search help me
do that. And they go down the list one by one, removing the things that do not help them monetize display ad space on their website and we get to basically exactly where the OJ's complaint started, with the exception of because he was on the cell side, they didn't touch the DSP like they left DV three or or they got exhausted with them with this, but but we got to exactly why, Like to me, it actually would this was the best way to explain to the judge why
their complaint outline the markets that it did. So in my view it kind of completely horribly backfires published anywhere.
The spaghetti will yet the monstrative football I should say food was a was a theme today because even with the first witness this morning, who was the expert the last expert for the DJEE.
Yeah, and Google was really trying to confuse the judge and confuse him and he was really sharp and did not fall for a lot of things that they tried
to get to bite on. But well, bad pun. Sorry, but but Google's attorney was bringing up trying to bring up product differentiation, I think, and I think was at the time was trying to explain why they charged twenty percent for their att exchange for the last decade while everyone else charges a lower rate and why they could justify this higher price and it wasn't just because of monopoly maintenance, and so he was talking about differentiating higher
value from lower value. I think so he brought up like he was. Well, first he brought up I think chips and gasoline at gas stations, but then he brought up the Whopper versus the Big Mac, and then he brought up coke ver Stepsi and the judge at some point interrupted and said, you must be really hungry this morning, so.
You don't need the judge saying stuff like that.
It's not it was. I think she was amused. She was trying to bring fun to ad tech after ten days of watching Google get tortured. So he also did.
Not Chiquita bananas versus I'm like, nice, Well, at least today instead of comparing apples to oranges, they're going to do bananas to bananas. So it's progressed Jesus.
So what is Google's argument? What is that actual?
They just lost on market definition, They've lost on you know, they lost on confusing the judge. I think I think they're down to the maybe the two sets. It's this MX case of two side and market versus if it's one market, the whole thing versus individual markets. But I don't everybody talk to doesn't think they have a prayer there can you woke me through it?
Despite its flimsiness.
Well, one, I'm not an expert on the MX Supreme Court case. But if you think about a credit card transaction where on both sides it happens all at once, then there is a case that went Spring Court. I think it was Ohio versus I think it's OOMX. I'm now outside of my boundary, but this idea that it's a single market and both parties are transacting together at
the same moment versus this is a market. There's clearly a byside, clearly a cult side, there's different actors on both sides, and there are companies that you know, a couple of companies that participate in multiple places just they can't really compete. So it's it's very different than a single credit card transaction.
If it makes also, no, I'm pretty stupid, but something obvious here seems to be that doesn't google bit at the beginning and the end of the auction. It's right, then that really isn't one thing happening in an instant, that's.
Several things, multiplaces where it comes together then into a yeah, yeah, there's and there's a bunch of different things, right. There's price, there's prices that you know when you buy from MX it's a single transaction. You don't have an auction. There's there's lots of different things here that I think just fall apart.
So and they also try and make it sound like it like in order like inherently in order to serve one side, you have to also serve the other side. That is simply not the case. Like, yes, there are a few companies that have have or had before they got driven out of the market, a DSP and SSP and an ad server, right, but there are also standalone DSPs there standalone ad servers, a handful of them left, right, they're standalone exchanges. So it kind of falls apart in
that way as well. But I agree that that is the only art I think. Unfortunately for them, they've put all of their eggs in that basket. The other arguments that they're making about pro competitive rationales are just very flimsy. I actually, I mean it's so I made buzzword bingo this week. I made Bingo cards and I passed them out to the press box but it's every day we hear. They're trying to convince the court that the fees for their products and their growth is justified by the better
quality of their products. So they talk a big game about inventory quality and inventory curation via add acts that they vet. They vet the ad advertisers that are allowed to advertise there, They that the publishers that are allowed to monetize, and its like it just has in reality. They talk about.
Real good if you don't use the Internet.
They talk about spam, malware, ad fraud, brand safety. So they're trying to hold out their product as like the pinnacle of these things. The interesting thing is from the economists perspective quality is the way that they describe that Robin Lee described quality is for publishers that would be yield revenue money like that, that would be quality, and for advertisers it would be ROI. So it's a it's a lot of like chickens talking at ducks and using
words to describe different different things. The other thing I would say that they're doing is they jump from perspective to perspective depending on when it's convenient, right, So if something is harming publishers, they'll talk about how it benefited advertisers, But the question here is about is about the impact of publishers. They do that all day, right, So that's the other kind of little bit of a game that they're playing. They're trying to show that where something was
bad for publishers, it was good for someone else. And I think that the DOJ has done a good job of also deconstructing that through largely through their expert witness testimonies.
Yeah. The one other thing I add on the pro competition because I felt like I got a taste of it at the end of today, is and there's the Google. The first witness. They were talking about the mission of Google to fund the information of the world and where that probably will go. And I saw this with a search trial and I saw the app store trial they
Googled member. They lost both of those, but they tried to make an argument that all of this conduct and all this wealth that we're creating through through this Android operating system and through this ad marketplace that we create, actually helps fund this entire ecosystem. Right, So if you can argue that, you know, all the way that they're running their conduct to create a bigger ad market actually
ends up driving more revenue through to publishers. Then that's they would argue that that's pro competitive even though they're taking more and more of the money over time, and and they're the one that's worth you.
Know, to again through the debt thing that we talked about last time A published it dat. Yeah, that kind of very severely undermines their argument. Jason, you were at the such trial. You said, Yes, how has Google felt different between them? Is it the same attorneys? Is different attorneys? Is there? Their argument sounds much weaker at the very.
Least totally different set of attorneys. And I would say that this case is more complicated, so there's a bigger opportunity to try to confuse things. Where the search case really came down to, you know, would the judge understand and when be able to prove the network effects and the importance of scale with data and then you know, is buying out the exclusive search slot is that truly
exclusive or is that just a preference, et cetera. So like there's this definition of exclusively conduct anyway, so that one was more I think a matter if you had to play it out and you got to see some of the bad conduct. But it was ultimately going to be based on some legal analysis where this one. You know, the actual storytelling is really really important on both sides.
And you know, to be fair, we're only a half a day into Google's defense, but it looks like the the just departments got a lot better material.
So there there is one thing I was reminded of as you were talking that I'm actually curious to get your take on while we're here. I think if there were one argument that seems to be landing somewhat with the judge, it is this idea that in order to they're being asked to provide access to their customers, or they're being they're being asked to allow things that would
require them to build new functionality for their tools. I don't understand how that would land, even even even if we buy that they would have to build these things like how many millions do they make in a minute. So I don't I don't really understand, but I just I say that because I know. I think today the judge did ask the expert witness, or she allowed a line of questioning to continue that seemed to indicate that this is an area that she is thinking about. So I was curious about your take.
I mean, at risk of ed asked me to explain another Supreme Court decision. I think that that's trying to get at the other defense that Google try to lay out there walking in, which is this Trinco case that basically it's a refusal to deal, that a duty to deal, and does does a company have to actually enable its rivals or provide APIs or allow its rivals to use
its products? But that's not really central to the case, and it's really a matter of they tied their markets together and force the customer bases to use them and so but I think that's the line of defense they're trying.
To be also being discovery throughout this case, where people just talk about addicts sucking, there's that being a shitty product that sucks.
It's cost twice as much and it's not as good. Because yeah, I mean, that's it's a definition of monopoly.
Right, Yeah, it's it really feels like we're watching an empire crumble. It's so strange because you you look at these companies for years, it's these kind of immovable beasts, these titans that will never be broken. But when they're in front of the Department of Justice, Like I don't know, man, Like it's actually good we do this, like look at my look at my annoying drawing I did, Like what
do you think? Like it's just strange, like how it was always this flimsy, really interesting to watch them have to draw it out in that spaghetti football on a screen and not be able to use any other fancy video and storytelling beyond you know, the attorney at the electron and a single visual on the wall, and you know, everybody in the courtroom is watching Google pass post it notes back and forth from its attorneys to it's cobbs people to run out the door and try to tell
their story outside the courtroom because there's no TVs or you know, audio ittever one. That was one thing that you tweeted out that I'd love to talk about, though, some of the pre briefs that Google had been doing around Google Ads. I would love to talk about that, primarily fiend of the show Casey Newton, who had the Google's Google's lawyer's hand up his asshole, not literally, but he was doing ventral Chris bullshit. So there was a
story towards the end of October twenty twenty. I believe where Casey Newton on Platformer I apologized was suggesting anyone's hands with anywhere near anyone's unmentionables there It's not true. However, Casey clearly he and as part of the discovery, which I will link in the episode notes, Jason, you posted this.
It's they briefed a bunch of journalists, including Casey Newton, and then Casey Newton put out this piece which is like, yeah, here's why I think the Google the Google's argument against the oj Ovisa it's actually good. But also, yes, I went and chased that bad boy down. Tell me the little bit about these briefs because so I.
Didn't want to call any individual because that's my job. They're they're yeah, so you know what we saw. What we saw was when the the Justice Department filed its search complaints again, which is the one they just won in August. So I, like, I tried to remind everybody that when I when I shared that thread is this is a complaint that was filed and then they lost. People lost this right, It's a winning complaint by just department.
And what we saw was google systematic reaction to when that complaint was filed, and all the people that they breathed, the friends of theirs that went on air on television to defend them, the editorial boards that they pitched, that wrote pieces, and most of those pieces were all here's why the just Department has filed a lousy case. Here's why Google's going to win. Here's why, you know, people don't understand how important Google is to our world. And
it turns out all those people were wrong. And you know, and when you're writing a piece like that with the high take the day the complaints filed, and I guarantee most of them never read the complaint and never saw the you know, the discovery that then came afterward. Yeah, you're bound to be wrong if you're just listening to Google. And so yeah, yeah, it's the spin machine.
And I will just not not put any words in anyone's mouth other than my own case. You in October twentieth, twenty twenty. This piece is quite long. I'd say it's about fifteen hundred and two thousand words, and it talks about where the where the DOJ's case is weak for quite some time, but then at the end says he spoke with a spokesperson but it is word for word basically what they wanted him to say. It's just shameless. It's such shameful shit. Not talking specifically about Casey anymore
so that you guys can say something. It just sucks because look, this case is, as we are finding over these episodes, deep and weird to pull apart, and the same as with search as well. And there's nothing wrong with showing both sides of it. But at the same time, I feel like being briefed by Google's lawyer is not actually showing both sides.
That's right, I mean, that's why, that's why I'm so happy to be here throughout, even though it's obviously massively disruptive to my regularly scheduled life. But that's but that's exactly why it's so important. Google has so many resources at their disposal. They have such a well oiled spin machine, and it's very difficult to cut through the noise to
give perspective on actual reality. Right, So, like, yes, I absolutely have my opinions, but it's been equally as important with this trial to give people resources to develop their own conclusions and to do their own analysis. So, like we we've been pulling the exhibits into a way that's more organized to just try and empower people to.
Usv Google ads dot com. We've been hyping it in every episode is bad and work, but.
Like, yes, so I absolutely love weaving in my commentary into my updates, right. But the reality is a lot of the resources on that website are just to that there are resources so that others have things to look at that aren't coming just from Google's comms team, you know.
And I think the problem with Casey's peace that I am going to bang on him a little bit because he deserves it, is the I actually don't mind even if someone agreed with Google, if someone was just like I actually think this case is weak. Like Nili Pateau, who have my problems with he said it was a vacation. I don't know if I agree, but that came off as nil given an opinion, which is fine, yeah, good
pr whatever, but still his opinion. What Casey did here was presented as if this was some sort of objective analysis, and I think that what frustrates me about a lot of this is you also, I don't believe objective analysis really exists. I think everything's subjective. But also if you are. If you're going to talk to Google's law talk to the Department of Justice lawyer if they'll even talk to you,
and if they won't, don't talk to Google's lawyer. Yeah, because you are being influenced and Google has so much money. It's not like you are helping a pop star. It's not like you're helping your favorite author. You're helping a multi trillion dollar juggernaut that controls chunks of the world's economy and knowledge like lorn to their reputation. It's it's just it's frustrating.
The also, the thing we saw them celebrate at the top of their summary, which is definitely a peeve of mine. Everybody on Twitter knows, and I feel like I've made a little bit of a dent. There is Google and Facebook does this too. Puts a blog post up that's labeled often as like news, and then they put down basically a press release, and their whole goal is to get people to share that, right, and so reporters, as soon as they post, will then share that blog post.
And Google noted that half of the stories out there had links to their blog post, right, which is basically just doing their press for them and so yeah, yeah, I mean, but to be fair and flip this around in the positive, and it's where we kind of talked at the very end last episode, ED, is that because I reflected on this today, I'm sitting there in the courtroom and I'm looking and I've got two full rows in front of me of Google Comms people, two full rows.
But over on the left there were also three rows of press, which we did not have in a search case. They're in the room, Bloomberg, New York Times, you know, adles, et cetera. They're all sitting there and they're hearing the exact same thing because they have to be in the room, which is kind of interesting. You know, they can't be off walking the halls. They have to be in the room.
They're gonna miss it. And then RL's back in the corner too, just nailing everything down and like so it does feel like we've got actual eyes and ears in the room and getting the facts out there in a better way than the search case.
And it also feels like the ad pers. I feel like the digital ad press has been like often honestly a few years where kind of worried they were going away, they've come back quite aggressively here, and I don't think anything. I don't think it's anything. If it's personal, it's just because Google's been fucking around, they're finally finding out. I
don't think it's any particular agenda. But also I do challenge you listeners if you think any of this is reporters coming in with an agenda, look at the other side, Look at what the tech industry has done using the media, and look at this. We should be proud as members of the media, of the ad tech press and how they have gone about this, and how Arielle and Jason are ruining their weeks going to this courtroom. But it's
great because this is an empire. In my opinion, this is his opinion that needs to fall that it needs to be fair. Why do you and I are normal people have to compete like regular people, and these rich bastards get to do more. It's just frustrating. I like seeing them burn. I'm completely subjected by the way. I do not pretend otherwise.
All good, All good? It so yeah, so Google, we'll have probably about a week left of defending itself and then they'll be back to you know, maybe some rebuttals and stuff, but then it'll be to the judges. So about week left, I think yeah, I think by next Friday.
Hell yeah, well I think I think we can call it there. Jason, where can people find you?
Jasonderscore Kent k I N T or you can always check out Digital Content next dot org, who I work for, and all of our resources and our accounts there too, an Ariel.
Ariel as Garcia or as dot org or USV googleads dot com.
I'm I'm everywhere, but also genuinely USV Google Ads is so good. It is one of the best, the best things out there. And you can read all of those wonderful emails where they're just like, yeah, we love doing monopolies. Be a little bit dramatic there, but thank you so much everyone for listening. I'm of course ed Zitchron and yeah, we'll have probably another at least one more episode on this and then we can wrap it up. Thank you so much, thanks for having us by, Thank you for
listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com. M A T. T O. S O. W s ki dot com. You can email me at easy at better offline dot com or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot at to visit the discord, and go to our
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