US District Court Judge Amit Mehta may be sitting in his chambers at this very moment deliberating his decision in the Department of Justice’s landmark antitrust case against Google over its (alleged) dominance of the search market.
His ruling, expected this fall, is highly anticipated. If Judge Mehta sides with the government, Google will have to make major modifications to its search business. (The exact remedy would be decided during a subsequent hearing.)
That would “change the game and unleash innovation in search that you really haven’t seen in 20 years,” says Adam Epstein, co-CEO and president of search advertising company adMarketplace, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Speaking of change, when adMarketplace was founded in 2000, the search world looked dramatically different. Google was only two years old, the search engine space was full of competitors, and Google’s search algorithm was really innovative, Epstein says.
But Google went public in 2004 and slowly but surely thought more about the gods of Wall Street and search monetization than the quality of the search results themselves, he says.
“Google’s up against the law of big numbers, and they have a workforce and an executive team that’s comped mostly by the value of their share price,” Epstein says. “Of course, that’s a difficult thing to manage, [and] when you’ve got 90% market share, there’s really very few ways you can increase your stock price except for value extraction.”
Also in this episode: Is AI-generated search the future, why Google’s Performance Max has some search advertisers hopping mad and how answering a Craigslist ad changed Epstein’s life. Plus: Why testimony and depositions from the DOJ’s soon-to-be-decided search suit against Google could resurface in the government’s ad-tech-focused antitrust suit against Google. That trial begins on September 9.
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