If you’ve bought Google Search or display ads at some point over the past decade or so, Ashley Keller thinks Google might owe you money.
Ashley Keller is a plaintiffs’ attorney and a founding partner of Keller Postman, a law firm that helped pioneer the concept of mass arbitration campaigns against Big Tech companies. Unlike a class action, where a few representative plaintiffs stand in for everyone, mass arbitration is made up of thousands of individual cases, each filed separately but coordinated and pushed through the system at scale.
A few years ago, for example, the firm filed more than 75,000 arbitration demands over Amazon’s Alexa allegedly recording private conversations without consent and storing the audio data.
Amazon’s response?
After Keller Postman’s blitz, Amazon dropped its mandatory arbitration clause, opening the door for people to sue in court and join class actions instead of being forced into individual arbitration.
“I think it’s a good thing that people are able to pursue class actions where they’re warranted,” Keller says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “That’s a good success story.”
(That “success story” now has a twist, however. Less than a week after we recorded this episode, Amazon reinstated binding arbitration for US customers, according to Reuters, once again blocking class-action suits and effectively putting the old system back in place.)
But whatever happens with Amazon, Keller Postman is already running its playbook with an eye on a different target: Google’s ad business.
In April, Keller Postman began filing arbitration demands against Google over alleged advertiser overpayments it pegs at roughly $218 billion.
The foundation for the claims is the fact that two separate federal judges have found Google guilty of operating illegal monopolies, one over search and search advertising and another over the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for display.
“Anybody would tell you that a monopoly is going to change the monopoly price, not the free market price,” Keller says, “and the difference between that price and the free market price multiplied by three are your damages.”
According to Keller, the firm has already filed thousands of demands for arbitration on behalf of Google advertisers, and he says he expects that number “to be in the tens of thousands by the time all is said and done.”
“If you have advertised with Google through the ad tech stack or on search, which I think is going to describe the overwhelming majority of people listening [to this podcast] … you’ve been harmed,” Keller says. “If you don’t bring this suit, you’re just leaving that money on the table.”
Also in this episode: The irony of buying digital advertising through the walled gardens to find claimants – “I use the products and services of all the companies I sue regularly,” Keller says – and his firm’s behind-the-scenes work with Texas on the ad tech antitrust case that helped lay the groundwork for the DOJ’s ad tech complaint against Google. Plus: Keller’s love of loud techno music.
