Economists are famous for hedging their bets. Ask an economist a question, and they’ll usually respond with, “Well, it depends.”
And when it comes to potential remedies in the Google ad tech antitrust case, fair enough – because, honestly, who knows?
Judge Leonie Brinkema, whose job it is to rule on the remedies, has her work cut out, says Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
She needs to balance the interests of publishers and advertisers and promote competition while simultaneously ensuring that any remedy – structural or behavioral – doesn’t simply amount to a transfer of wealth from one massive entity to another.
That said, unlike in the search case, where a forced spin-off of Chrome was never gonna happen – and even if it had, “it most certainly would have been overturned on appeal,” Manne says – a court-ordered divestiture of GAM isn’t beyond the pale in the ad tech case.
“A structural remedy is much more likely here than it ever was [in the search case],” Manne says. “It’s very much a possibility here, and if it happens, it wouldn’t be overturned on appeal.”
Nonetheless, Manne isn’t convinced Judge Brinkema will go that way. He’s not a betting man, he says, but if he were forced to make a prediction, he’d err on the side of no spin-off.
We’ll most probably see the judge impose a bunch of behavioral remedies that represent some mix of what the DOJ is seeking tempered with Google’s preference for more limited conduct-focused fixes.
“[But] I don’t think it’ll be too far off from what Google is proposing,” Manne says.
Also in this episode: Why the DOJ’s market definition in the ad tech case may have been too narrow, what healthy competition could look like in the ad tech market and Manne’s love of jam band Phish. (He’s been to roughly 85 shows.)
