Transcripts For CSPAN2 Senate Hearing On Google Online Ads Market Competition 20240712

I want to thank Ranking Member klobuchar and her staff for working closely with me and my office as we prepared for today and i also want to thank our chairman, the chairman of the full Senate Judiciary committee, senator graham, for his support of this hearing. After i and then senator klobuchar giving our opening remarks, well hear from two panels of witnesses with questions from members of the subcommittee. We have Something Interesting to deal with in the senate and every time they call votes, when they call votes during a subcommittee hearing, were at their mercy. Senator klobuchar and i have both cast our votes on the first of a series of three or four. At some point, were going to have to pause or tag team as we allow other members to sit in for us, just dont be eisenhower sitting on a stone block in the direction of the greatest accomplishments the president of the United States and Supreme Commander of the forces him. Greg on welcome to todays hearing with the policy and Consumer Rights we have chosen for today if google has harmed competition with Online Advertising thank you to the Ranking Member klobuchar and her staff working closely with me in my office as we prepare for today and the chairman of the fold Judiciary Committee. After he gave our opening remarks you have seven minute rounds of questions. D in any conduct that harms competition and harms consumers. But before we go into that, i want to say just a few things about antitrust policy more broadly. Ive been a member of the subcommittee ever since 2011 when i first arrived in the senate and ive chaired the subcommittee for almost six years. Over that time as the public debate surrounding antitrust policy and enforcement has grown and in some cases evolved, so too has the gulf between the opposing sides. At one extreme are those who would rather that we have no antitrust laws at all. And the alternative, they advocate for an enforcement policy that is overly differential, speculative efficiencies and quick to dismiss evidence of competitive harm whenever it might conflict with unproven economic theories. This extreme end of the continuum fetishizes freedom to the exclusion of the laws that maintain that very freedom. They forget that markets, like governments, do not keep themselves free and that liberty is only secure when power is diffused. Theres been an agenda pushed to transform the antitrust laws in this country from a tool based in Economic Science to protect and promote competitive markets into a panacea for all of their perceived social ills. Built on the economically my myopthic that big is bad, these may be lotable goals, but theyre not problems that antitrust laws are meant to solve nor are they problems that antitrust law is capable of solving without creating a whole bunch of other problems. Attempts to repurpose antitrust law into a social Justice Program would have scores of unintended consequences that would cripple our economy for generations and of course theres the hypocrisy that big is bad, that they would expand in order to dismantle and regulate them. You may be wondering where i see myself in those two extremes, whose side am i on . Am i on the side of the American People . Yes. Am i on the side of the law . Yes. I believe enforcement of antitrust laws have made this the most prosperous nation on earth and our current laws are sufficient to meet the challenges of the day. I said a moment ago that liberty is only secure when power is defused. This is a bedrock principle of our republic. The concept of federalism, the greating contribution of our founding generation and document is what makes america unique among all other nations. This principle applies equally to economic power as it does to economic power. In a way, antitrust laws might be described as federalism for the economy. That brings us to today. Were here to discuss what may be the seminole antitrust case of the 21st century. One whose president will define the terms of competition and innovation in our dynamic economy for years, in fact for decades to come. Unlike some of my colleagues in the house, im not interested in staging a political spectacle to attack and talk over witnesses. Naive though it may be in 2020, my hope is that by looking at this specific question we can have a serious conversation about the state of competition in digital markets. Online advertising is an incredibly complex business and one that touches every Single Person on the internet. The technologies involved in connecting advertisers and publishers have evolved rapidly in the last decade and the expansion of Online Advertising has facilitated an explosion of online content by allowing the smallest website owners to moneytize the content they produce. Small and local businesses have also benefitted from being able to quickly and easily promote their businesses without any of the same Capital Investments that would have been required and indispensable for that effort just a few decades ago. At the same time this growth and this expansion has been largely consolidated onto a single platform. Googles online ad business. As that business has grown, so too have complaints that google, which both operates the ad selling and ad buying platforms and sells its own inventory through those platforms. As conflicts of interests is manipulated and rigged Online Technology to favor its own interest and protect its own market share. Whether this is true or not matters because so many businesses depend upon Digital Advertising to market their products or to moneytize the content that they produce. Web users benefit from free online content and being connected to relevant businesses in a way that helps them to make optimal business decisions. Simply put, markets function better when businesses thrive and consumers are informed. Online advertising helps accomplish this. If however Online Advertising has been monopolized and constrained, everyone loses to that degree. I would also add that google and other Big Tech Companies have been accused of a number of bad acts unrelated to antitrust or to competition. I myself have repeatedly expressed concerns about an anticonservative bias by these firms. And ill continue to pursue those concerns. But while i believe it issues like anticonservative bias have implications for antitrust such as perhaps evidencing market power, todays hearing is not fundamentally about those concerns. This hearing is about an analytically distinct issues that are a legitimate subject of inquiry. I reject using antitrust to solve other nonantitrust concerns. Todays discussions will, i hope, help everyone to better understand the Online Advertising market and how competition works or should work and how it might not be operating as well as it could in that space. I look forward to hearing from our experienced and highly qualified witnesses. Thank you and ill now turn to Ranking Member klobuchar for her opening remarks. Thank you so much, mr. Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses, to mr. Harrison appearing virtually and i want to start by making something absolutely clear. We are notoinw having this hear because google is successful. Google is successful. I just used it on my way here. Or because google is big. Thats not why from my perspective were having this hearing. We are having it because even successful companies, even Popular Companies and even Innovative Companies are subject to the laws of this country including our antitrust laws. We are all successful when we make sure that our economy is strong and our economy is working better. But the law cant be blinded by googles success or its past innovations if the company in its zeal to achieve greater success crosses a line into anticompetitive behavior. Its our job to regulate it. Its that simple. So were going to touch on issues, i hope, today of competition, technological innovation, the use of personal data, these are some of the defining issues, as the chair has said, defining issues of our time and i personally think, as we go into the months to come, this wont just be about google. This isnt just about the Tech Industry as much as i believe we need to change our laws and look at changing the burdens and making it so that our laws are sophisticated as the companies that now occupy our economy. I think we need to do all that and i think it should be a huge priority going into the year. But right now as the chairman mentioned, we are focused on this issue today. Our society has never been more dependent on this technology than we are now in the midst of this global pandemic. As i noted, not just google, the pandemic has forced a bunch of Small Businesses to close their doors and the five largest Tech Companies continue to thrive to the point where they briefly accounted for nearly 25 value of the entire s p 500 stock index just a few weeks ago. I dont quarrel with their success but we have to look at do our laws match that situation. And even if the original intent when these companies started as startups was to be innovative, which theyve been, at what point do you cross a line so you squelch innovation and competition from other companies. The powerful companies that provide us with these technologies are collecting personal information. We know that. They know who our friends are, they know the books we read, where we live, whether weve graduated from college, income levels, race, how many steps we took yesterday. The chairman and i share an interest in this. How long weve stayed where we are. Machine learning, analyzes troves of personal data, allowing our firms to discern even more Sensitive Information about us, our medical conditions, political, religious views and even preferences that we dont even know we have. And why would companies do all of this . Put simply, to target us with digital advertisements. Theres really no other reason. It is a capitalist society. Thats what they do. Now google makes more money doing that than any company in the world, by leveraging its unmatched access to consumer data gained through itself existing dominance in Online Mobile operating systems, android, email, gmail, youtube, browsers, chrome, google maps and Ad Technology. This Ad Technology ecosystem, known as the ad tech stack consists of advertisers on one side and publishers on the other. On the advertising side google controls access to the huge number of advertisers that place ads on Google Search which is 90 of the Search Market and has unparalleled access to data. Google h it also effectively controls the process, the ad auction process that gets an advertisers ad to be put on a publishers site. Google dominates all the markets for services on both sides of the ad tech stack, the establisher side and the advertising side and i hope that will be a lot of our focus today. Research has suggested that google may be taking between 30 and 70 of every advertising dollar spent by advertisers using its services depriving publishers of that revenue. Who are the publishers . Theyre content producers. The minneapolis star tribune, to me given that my dad was a journalist, to me this is one of the key elements here because if you have unfairness in how that ad echo system is going, youre depriving these news organizations at a time when the First Amendment is already under assault of the revenue that they need to keep going. So whether its happening, and we dont know all of the details at the department of justice right now, this could be the beginning of a reckoning for our antitrust laws to start looking at how were going to grapple with the new kind of markets that we see across the country. It would help answer the question whether our federal antitrust laws are able to restrain the business conduct of the Largest Companies in the world. When you think of the breakup of at t, that was our last big thing that happened in the antitrust area. What did that lead to . Lower prices, more competition. It really worked. But were not able to do this right now. And my hope is that were getting the start and the Justice Department, that things are going on at the ftc. But to really do that, theyre going to do resources to take on the legions of lawyers at the companies and thats my first goal. What can we do for enforcement. My second what do we have to do to make the laws work better, to look at some of the deals that have already been made. What are the remedies . Do they make a difference in changing the behavior and allowing competition . I literally dont have personal grudges against these Companies Like sometimes the president has expressed about various companies. I dont. I just want our capitalist system to work. I want it to work and to have it work you simply cant have one company dominating areas of an industry. Our Founding Fathers started this country in part because they were rebelling against monopoly power. We need to keep that spirit of entrepreneurship strong in this country and this is a good way to start. Thank you, mr. Chairman. I will be here for questions. Thank you. And youll be here in spirit, either way. Thank you very much, senator klobuchar. Well have two panels today. Our first panel will consist of mr. Harrison. He is joining us virtually. If youll stand please to be sworn. Do you affirm that the testimony youre about to give before the committee will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I do. Thank you. Ill briefly introduce our witness for our first panel, don harrison is googles president of Global Partners and corporate development. He oversees googles Strategic Partners worldwide and is responsible for product and ecosystem enablement and commercial partnerships across googles business groups. Hes worked on grade schooogle transactions. He also manages googles internal incubator, area 120 and gradie gradient ventures. He started his career at the toronto law firm. After earning a degree in Political Science in philosophy. Thank you for joining us today and we look forward to your testimony. Well now hear your opening remarks. Chairman lee, Ranking Member klobuchar, and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is don harrison. I lead our Partnerships Team where we support the growth of our products to partnerships working with a range of businesses to help them use our products to grow and succeed. I oversee our inhouse incubator fostering innovation and the development of new technologies. My job at its core is to help other businesses grow. As our partners businesses grow, ours does as well. We build tools that help businesses grow. One way we help is through advertising. Over 36 of clicks to american advertisers come from overseas. Online advertising prices in the u. S. Have fallen 40 since 2010. The benefits of these prices flow to american businesses and consumers. We help businesses grow from advertising on our own sites and other sites. A wide range of businesses including many small firms advertised on our sites in apps like Google Search and youtube. Thats where we earn a majority of our revenue. In addition to ads on our own properties, google helps businesses advertise in a wide range of other websites known as publishers. We offer technology that helps advertisers buy ad space and helps publishers sell their ad space. This technology is referred to as ad tech. It accounts for a small fraction of our advertising revenue and we share the majority of that revenue with publishers. The ad tech space is crowded and competitive. We compete with adobe, amazon, at t, oracle and verizon, as well as many more. Publishers and advertisers use tools from an array of providers. The average publisher uses multiple tool and is the average advertiser uses multi advertisers. In 2018 we paid more than 14 billion to our partners. This up from 10 billion in 2015 publishers kept over 69 of the ad revenue, more than the industry average. In other areas when it comes to ad tech we take an open approach. We make our tools interoperable with rivals, increasing choice and competition. Publishers and advertisers enjoy a wide range of choices. Our tools get publishers access to demand from over 700 advertising platforms, and advertisers access to more than 80 publisher platforms. This fosters vibrant competition. Our tools can also work sa seamlessly together generating efficiency, speed and security benefits for publishers, advertisers and consumers. The free and open internet we all enjoy is made possible by advertising. Without it websites with be forced to adopt subscription on models, bring their content behind pay walls or shut down operations entirely. This would harm consumers with higher prices and reduce choice online. Looking ahead well continue investing in space Building Tools that help publishers and advertisers grow their businesses, supporting a free and open internet we all enjoy. Thank you for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I look forward to continuing to engage with the committee on these important issues. Thank you very much, mr. Harrison. Thank you for joining us today. Were going to now launch right into our alternating rounds of sevenminute questions and i will begin that. At the outset i want to address something briefly that i mentioned in my Opening Statement, and that is that i and many of my colleagues are concerned about anticonservative bias at google and on some other online platforms. Earlier this year i expressed grave concern and had grave concern upon learning that google reportedly had banned the conservative website the federalist from monetizing its content through google ads. I want to be clear here that a private Company Engaging in censorship on its own platform is not a violation of antitrust laws. Nevertheless, as i pointed out in my letter to your company on this subject, isnt this behavior evidence of market power . Why would any company want to treat its customers that way unless it was confident that its customers had no viable alternative . Can you help me understand that . Thank you, senator. Just a couple quick points. One, the federalist, and there were some comments made in your Opening Statement and in senator klobuchars Opening Statement about there being a lack of choice. Publishers like the federalist have many choices how to monetize their content. The federalist actually uses 30 different tools to help it monetize its content, and so it has many choices if its unhappy how were providing services. In the example youre talking about, there was we have to have clear policies about how we show our advertisements. And no one most advertisers do not want their advertisements to show up next to harmful content. In the case of the federalist, the federalist had comment boards that had commentary in it, some of which our systems made clear was racist commentary, and weve been clear in our policies that our ads cant show up next to that kind of commentary. We did try to work with the federalist and there are a bunch of options available to accompanying this situation. First of all, they cannot have a Comment Section. Secondly, they can moderate their Comment Section to take out comments that violate our ads policies. Or, third, they can do a click through, and there are many large publishers like the New York Times that have a click through on their Comment Section so they dont show ads on that section in which theyre commenting. Youre not suggesting that the federalist and management are racist . No, not at all. Im saying that youre talking solely about the commentary, about their obligation you would like to see them have to moderate the commentary on their site, is that right . Absolutely. This is what i find ironic. Ironic, some with say hypocritical, google justifies deplatforming a website from its ad, the federalist because of content not by the site itself that the site itself has produced but because of content on the sites Comment Section. While google insists that the protections it receives under section 230 of the Communications Decency act are essential to shield it from liability from its own users content. How is that not a double standard . And, again, isnt the fact that google feels bold enough to act this way evidence that it perhaps doesnt feel competition . Doesnt feel threatened even potentially by any competition . Senator, there is no allegation the federalist is racist. Those Comment Sections can contain bad comments, comments users have uploaded to the system. First of all, you mentioned section 230. 230 is helping many publishers deal with the fact they shouldnt be legally responsible for the comments that are uploaded to their system. Section 230 is a helpful part of making sure that publishers and platforms can stay operating even in a world where they might have Comment Sections and people can upload those Comment Sections. Secondly, we have the same problems on youtube. Youtube has Comment Sections. Sometimes those Comment Sections contain language that violates our own policies, and we have systems that capture this. We have systems that can remove hundreds of millions of comments before anyone sees this, Machine Learning and human flags that make sure these comments are taken down, that theyre removed. And i think we capture almost 99 of comments before they are read. Again, we can work with sites like the federalist and many others to make sure they also adopt moderation policies that make sure they operate in accordance to their policies. They do have options. They dont only have options in terms of how to maintain their comment board, they have options to go to other Advertising Solutions if they think our solutions arent working. Most publishers use between four and seven different publisher tools to sell their advertising. The federalist i believe uses almost 30 different tools to sell its advertising. Im glad to know that. You dont dispute that you are a significant part of this. Still, unless im misunderstanding you, i still dont think youve answered my question. Isnt there a double standard . Help me understand why google should be entitled to that sort of deference but youre not willing to give that sort of deference to someone else, to another firm that you have just acknowledged isnt racist, doesnt sponsor those sorts of things, but people sometimes comment on those sites. I dont know, perhaps to get them excluded from googles platform. Is that possible . Its often referred to we demonetized or took away the federali federalists ability to use our services. We did not do that. We want to help the federalist continue to make money off the content it shows. They just need to make sure their Comment Section is moderated. I dont think any advertiser, and i dont think you would want any advertiser to see their advertisement showing up next to content that they dont agree with or that is objectionable or offensive. By the way, weve applied these policies to our own sites as well to the extent that this type of content is a risk of showing up on other platforms they need to comply in order to show advertising. Okay. I would love to turn back to 230 later and, again, this isnt directly relevant to the antitrust inquiry itself but its indicative of it. This is how a company behaves when it senses that it doesnt have meaningful competition. Mr. Harrison, moving on to another point if im an advertiser placing an ad using googles Ad Technology, its my understanding google doesnt tell me how much the publisher is receiving for displaying my ad or how much money each advertising dollar google might be keeping for itself. That might be frustrating for an advertiser trying to figure out whether or not shes getting a good deal. And consider Comparison Shopping. Will you set the record straight and show where each dollar goes thats spent on googles ad platform . Thank you for the question, senator. I point out to the committee but im happy to share this we did recently publish two blogs that clarified both how fees work of the news industry and generally across the ad tech ecosystem. Let me address both. First of all, for news publishers, and this is an area were very we really got into ad tech in order to support open ecosystems. Google is a Search Engine. We benefit with vibrant, bright ecosystems where people need to look for information. Not only is that a benefit to the ecosystem but is a benefit to us because we help people find information. We got into ad tech to start providing these to publishers. We care deeply specifically about the news industry. We work closely with them. We recognize that theyre going through a hard evolution in their Business Model right now, and we have a lot of projects to try to help them including the gni, a 300 million effort to help the news industry. We also have massive investment in tools to help them monetize their content and products to help get subscribers. When it comes to the tools to monetize their content, they keep almost 95 cents of every dollar that they earn from advertisers. Mainly for two reasons. One, they can sell that advertisement directly and usually mostly they sell almost 75 of their advertisements directly. And when they do that, they pay very small fees to use our systems. A lot of people use our serving tools, were happy that its a popular product but we charge very small amounts of money to use that product. Then, with the portion that they sell programatically where they use both our ad site tools as well as our publisher side tools, they can pay anywhere from 70 they receive, sorry, 70 or more of the income from their advertisements. When you bundle these things together they keep 95 cents on the dollar. When it comes to the broader ecosystem outside of news publishers, weve done a full analysis of tools. I want to be clear this is all aspects of our tools, as if an advertiser chooses to use our ad side products and then a publ h publisher chooses to use our publisher side products and ad exchange is used to connect the two points. In those situations publishers keep more than 69 of the revenue, and thats above the industry average which is around 67 . Thank you. We have to move on to senator hawley. Showing how fees work isnt the same as transparency for the users on the actual bids. They know they keep 95 but they dont know of what, what the advertiser bid, nor do they know what google takes out of that bid. We might want to get back to that later. Meantime to senator hawley. Mr. Harrison, thanks for being here. Can we go back to the federalist to clarify something you said to senator lee. Do i understand now that you have a content moderation requirement in order to access googles ad platforms, is that right . Is that your testimony . No. Because the federalist didnt moderate their content section. What youre saying you require them now to engage in moderation in order to have access to your platforms. Is that right . No. Our ads policy is that our ads will not show up against harmful, offensive content. Thats the requirement. If they want to show our ads next to their content, then that content cant be harmful or offensive. So, in other words, they have to moderate it, right . Because they didnt moderate their content at all. This isnt even their content. Its thirdparty content and they didnt moderate it all which under section 230 they are perfectly entitled to do, but youre saying now that in order to have access to your, arguably, monopoly ad platform, they have to engage in content moderation and have to do it according to your standards . Is that accurate . Will you tell us the standards the federalist and others have to immediate the content moderation standards. Apologies if i wasnt clear earlier. They had three choices. They could choose not to show ads. They could choose to moderate, or they could choose to put their commentary behind a wall and not show advertisements against that. So, no, we werent requiring them to moderate. We gave them options on how to change in order to allow our ads to show up next to their content. Okay. So basically modify their site according to your standards in one of two ways, modify their site to hide a Comment Section which they did not moderate, its not their content, its thirdparty content. They either had to hide that section, put it behind a wall, you just said, or they have to engage in content moderation according to your standards. I think your testimony was a moment ago youre willing to help them do that, help them engage in this content moderation, is that right . Senator, the comments here that were talking about were highly racist comments but they werent the federalist comments. Small sites like the federalist compared to your massive sites like youtube, what do they have to do to access your ad platform and what i think you said, which is news, they have to engage in content moderation and they have to do it according to standards that you have, although i dont think any of us know what they are. I think it would be useful if everybody knew what those standards are and so i wonder if youll commit to me today that youll publish those moderation standards that you expect sites to meet if youre going to access your ad platforms. Will you do that . Senator, im happy to share our ads policies with you that make it clear we will not show ads next to offensive, misleading, disturbing content. Those policies are published and clear. Websites that are already online but im happy to share them with your office. Again, we did not require the federalist to adopt content moderation. We gave them options on how to make sure our ads could show up next to their content that didnt violate our policies, that wasnt offensive. Yeah, as senator lee pointed out, its extraordinary market power that would enable to you do Something Like this to basically call the tune for a small, independent publishers construction of their site, to design moderation policies for a thirdparty content that they dont monitor or use, and yet you are able to do this and force them to adopt these sorts of policies or effectively cut off their revenue stream. Thats extraordinary. Lets talk about your market dominance in this space while were on the subject. Google operates a publisher ad server, is that correct . Several, actually. Thats right. And google operates a supply Side Platform as well, is that correct . We offer platforms on both the publisher side and advertiser side. Right. You operate a demand Side Platform as well being correct . Thats correct. And you operate supply side, too. That is correct. The uks competition and markets Authority Commission recently found that googles market share in all of those layers of the ad stack is dominant. In the first market you have greater than 90 market share. In the Second Market between 40 and 60 . In the third between 50 and 70 . In the fourth over 90 . Do you know of any other company that exercises this kind of concentration and dominance across every layer of the ad stack . First of all, senator, we have built good products, and i am proud that the publishing system chooses to use the product. A couple things. One, the numbers which talk about ad serving, like specifically ad serving, the internet that allows ads to allow in publisher websites, we do have a popular product there. It doesnt take into account the richness of the entire ecosystem. Many publishers out there choose to provide their own advertising directly. Facebook does this. Amazon does this. Tiktok does this. Snap but they dont provide advertising on the open web. Are you telling me that you think the uks Authority Statistics are incorrect . Do you dispute these statistics . I do. I think they use too narrow at looking how to construct the market there and i dont think they took into account if we tried to raise prices that there were so many other options out there publishers or advertisers would flip to one of the other options. I would be very curious given that to hear what you think, what you assess your market share to be in each layer of the ad stack. Would you make that available to this committee . Senator, im very happy to cooperate with you with anything we have internally to help you understand how market share works. I just want to make one point. Price have is fallen actually, im not interested in your instruction on how market share works. Im interested in your response to the uks long study about your dominance in each layer of the ad stack. So ill take that as a yes. Well look forward to those statistics. Next, lets talk about your dominance in search and how youre using your dominance in search and video and youtube as well to help give you dominance in the ad stack. Its true that in order to place a display on youtube you have to go through a google platform, is that right . That is correct. And the same for search . If i want to put an ad in search, i have to go through a google platform, is that correct . Like Many Companies, we sell our owned and operating inventory through our channels. Many other companies do this as well. You control 92 of the market approximately for search. Does that sound right . No, i dont agree with that at all. I think when people search for things sometimes they use our product, which is a general Search Engine. But more often they use other types of apps and experiences to find what theyre looking for. Ill make one point about commercial searches. We would love it if people came to our website when they wanted to buy a car or buy a bike or when they waned to buy in california its about buying air purifiers and detecting air quality, but they go to amazon more often than they go to us. 70 of commercial queries start with a website other than google. Well, im talking about i understand that you would like, under your universal search aspirations, every search in the world to be conducted by the google platform. But when it comes to assessing markets, your aspirations and market definition are different things, and im simply quoting to you the statistics that other authorities, including the uk authority have found when they assess your dominance in the online Search Market but, again, if you have a different number, you can share that with us. I think you control 75 of the market for online video platforms. Here is my point. It looks like in order to advertise in fact, its true that in order to advertise on either of those dominant platforms you have to use a google ad platform. That gives you an enormous advantage, enormous advantage, in this ad stack that you control every single layer of. People come to you on the supply side and on the demand side because you control so much inventory, so much space, and also because you have so much data which you have collected through your consumer facing applications like gmail and search, for that matter, et cetera. Arent you using your monopolies in search and in video in order to boost and maintain a monopoly in the ad space as well . No, i think the right way is to ask are there lots of competitors, are prices falling . I think when you look at Online Advertising not only the search for information but Online Advertising youll see there are a lot of companies that are doing very well. I know i touchdown on this in my Opening Statement. Amazon has supply Side Platform. Over the last three years has grown so it is bigger than ours. You have small Companies Like the rub con that have grown immensely over the last few years because all of these companies are able to participate in either broad parts of the ad tech and Online Advertising or narrow parts of it, and theyre able to use whatever advantages they have in order to produce a competing product to ours. There is no lack of formats for people to advertise today whether its on mobile, whether its connected tv, whether its on the web, and there are no lack of Companies Including new Companies Like tiktok, which are becoming popular in terms of giving people new inventory to advertise against. I dont agree that there is no choice. If i could just ask the indulgence of senator klobuchar, could i ask two more questions . Of course. Thank you. Let me just come back to the issue of transparency, when google participates, when google itself participates by buying or selling on the auction, does google disclose what it made to either party during that transaction . We have contracts with advertisers where advertisers can see what fees they pay and we have contracts with publishers so the publishers can understand what fees they pay. So there is transparency. They know how many dollars they have put out in the market and they know how many but they know so is your answer, yes, they know what you when google itself im asking about you, because you, google, you buy and sell on the auction, and you do it on both sides. You do it on the supply side and on the demand side. Im asking when you buy and sell on the auction, do you disclose to the parties you represent what you paid . Senator, im not again, we have a series of let me ask in a different way. Do your clients know how much money google makes from transacting in the auction . One of the reasons we publish the blog that we published, and im happy to share that with you you can tell me here. Its much more interesting this way. Its much more interesting to do it under oath. Tell me here, explain it to us. Im sorry. If you are a publisher and you make inventory available, you know what you charge for that inventory and what you receive do they know what google makes . Do your clients know what you make for the transactions . You buy and sell on both sides of the same transaction because you control the entire ad stack. You control the whole thing. You control the exchange. You control the buying and the selling. So you buy and sell ostensibly representing other clients. I just want to know do your clients know how much you have made in a given transaction when youre buying and selling on both sides . So if it is a publisher that is making their inventory available, they are aware of how much they both received for the value of their inventory and how much they paid to us and to other members of the chain by which advertisements are sold. But they dont know what you made . They dont know what you made, the value of the transaction to you, you, google. You dont disclose that, or do you . Senator, im struggling with the question because i think there are so many pieces of the ad tech chain and so many different people that participate in it because it is an open architecture. Can you use our publisher tools but can use other advertising tools. Its hard for me to say publishers arent generally aware and advertisers arent aware of what publishers paid on that side of the equation. It isnt fully disclosed other than in each case you have contracting parties on both sides that have agreed to have signed agreements with us that make it clear to them how much theyre paying to us and how much theyre paying to themselves. The concern is, senator klobuchar has been extremely indulgent, you are well aware, there is a transparency in the market that you control end to end. You are paying prices. You are making profits that nobody is aware of, and its hard to get clear on. And so they dont know your clients dont know what your role in the transaction is or what profit you are taking away from it because you dont disclose that. Because you control the whole stack and buy and sell on both sides you privilege yourselves. With that ill yield. Shoe, senator klobuchar. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, mr. Harrison. According to the uks Competition Markets Authority google has dominant market share positions in every market in the ad tech ecosystem, what i was talking about in my opening. With particularly high market shares of at least 80 in both the publisher ad server and advertising markets. In the opinion of some experts google gained these dominant market share positions through acquisitions, buying double click in 2007, ad mob, insight media in 2010, and adometry in 2014. Thats quite the collection of names. Although some enforcers raised competition concerns about these deals when they were proposed, none were really challenged. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious that these acquisition acquisitions were undertaken by the company to add to its market share and without explanation that i cant think of anything else is there for this series of mergers over the course of years other than for google to establish the monopoly power it currently has. Mr. Harrison . Im sorry, senator the question is the question is what explanation is there for this series of mergers other than you were buying out what were or would have been eventual competitors. Going all the way back to the first acquisition which is double click we made a commitment because we recognized that a vibrant, healthy publisher ecosystem was to our benefit to invest in the tools and, again, the reason its to our benefit if there are one or two sites to go to were not a useful proposition fmt there are thousands of sites to find were a good Value Proposition and people use us. Do you think google would have had a 90 market if you hadnt bought double click . Respectfully and weve read the report, theres a couple things to note in that report. One, they found competitors were able to succeed in the market, amazon, twitter, snap being three examples. They found that publishers used between four and seven tools, advertisers used four and six tools. Theres tremendous choice as you work through this. Each of the acquisitions you outlined were us trying to find a piece of innovation in connection with ad mob, which is a good example, mobile. We had no real tool to do in app advertising, and so we recognized the chance to take ad mobs technology, invest it with our ability to scale and our knowledge of largescale computer systems. And i think we built ad mob into what is a very effective product for mobile advertisers. We didnt buy it because there was an anticompetitive intent. So are you troubled that at this point you have this market share without any real competitor in this area . I just dont agree with the market share. If we could take one aspect and i tried to address this earlier with senator hawley that ad serving market, which is one market that has been this is both publisher and ads serving the actual tags, that has been often cited as where we have a 90 share. When the ec looked at this issue in connection with double click they found when they considered inhouse tools, inhouse tools that could easily be made externalized and used by huge Companies Like facebook that our market share dropped to 20 . I think when you look through each of these, again, we have popular products, and he recognize that with that popularity comes questions, good questions like the ones youre asking. We dont agree that were dominant. We dont agree theres not a ton of choice. We think that market is operating very effectively. All right. Well, we disagree on the dominance. To another area because youtube represents nearly half of the video ad inventory available outside of, and this is outside of facebook and has a broader Audience Reach that facebook, Youtube Video ads are a must buy for advertising agencies. Initially all demand Side Platforms could bid to place ads on youtube. But in 2015 google limits access to only googles dsp 360. This, of course, a crippling effect on googles rivals because most advertising agencies prefer to use only one dsp, the limitation not only forces youtubes ad inventory into google dsp, it also had the effect of driving nonyoutube ad volume to google and away from the rival dsps. How does google justify its decision to limit access to youtube inventory to its own affiliates . In 2015 we were trying to wrestle with new european rules that were coming forward on privacy. And in response to that we migrated to what we called a true view viewing platform that allowed a number of features like being able to click through and not see ads and some of the tools around how you would watch videos that no longer made it compare apples to apples with other inventory available on adex, one of our exchanges. We had to make the decision to only provision that for our tools because we didnt know how to make it operate in a wide option competing against other video advertising. A couple things, and these come from the cma report, they found that youtubes share of display video advertising was only 10 to 20 and looked at many of the same variables you are looking at in terms of figuring out what market share was. They also there are many other companies that have been successful in selling their video advertising directly to their platform. And just as a final point but why wouldnt you have advertisers deal directly with youtube . They can. I dont understand. Im asking if you wanted to make youtube a walled garden, why not have them deal directly with youtube . As opposed to our ad service . Mmhmm. That is the tool that we put to advertisers in order to buy ads on our platforms. I think youre proposing a separate tool, and that didnt seem that doesnt seem to me to necessarily make sense. Okay. So twhwhenever we go through al these things the answer is that google argues it has no incentive to harm publishers, advertisers, or users. If this is true, why are we hearing so many complaints . Why do we keep hearing this . You dont hear complaints about companies all the time. When you start hearing them over and over again, it feels like a canary in the coal mine in terms of people feeling theres not an even Playing Field because of this buy side and sell side of the ad tech stack and that theres this inherent conflict of interest that they see, and it reflects in the lack of competition. Have you heard those complaints, and what would you do if you were us . Senator, we are a popular service, and i understand that. If i were you, i would ask the questions that you are asking. One last point, and i dont nope about the complaints you are talking about, but in the same period of time that we made this decision two platforms in particular, amazon, were able to grow and to become a larger platform than us without access to this inventory. I think many i think Many Companies have their own successful products, their own successful ways they can sell their advertising and are able to do that directly. Again, happy to keep answering these questions. Okay. I think youll be able to answer them from senator blumenthal who is here. Senator blumenthal . Thank you, senator klobuchar. Welcome to the committee, even though its virtual. I think, with all due respect, mr. Harrison, youve been given a really thankless task of defendsing the indefensible. Google claims that what it does is, in effect, preside over an open and free market, but in no other markets does the same party represent the seller, the buyer, make the rules, and conduct the auction. And i think that is the nub of the issue from an antitrust standpoint and seems unacceptable in a really free market and in a Free Enterprise system which is why i hope there will be antitrust enforcement directed against google. The european authorities have already shown us the way if their leadership on these issues to protect consumers. And the point of antitrust law is to protect consumers and competition, not necessarily other businesses, but other businesses are also victimized. Local newspapers like the Hartford Courant hire google to sell their ad space. So they can make their payrolls, employ people locally, provide news to people like me. And provide their communities with a Real Public Service and to sell those ads google collects sensitive commercial information about those newspapers and their readers. Every Single Person who, like me, wakes up, reads the courant and other newspapers and we trust to you ak as their agent on the ad market. They trust you to act as their agent. But google has an immense conflict of interest. You dont just represent the newspapers in the transaction but many times the advertisers as well. And you run and control the exchanges where the actual transaction happens. You are able to use that information you have on all the parties to extract massive possible value for google, which is why you are so immensely profitable. 40 on capital according to european authority. So let me begin by asking you does google firewall the publisher data from the rest of its clients and operation . First of all, senator, i want to say we are also highly committed to make sure that industry, which is a massively important industry, to a functioning democracy. Weve committed to Building Product for them to help them transition to subscriptions. We know that in time of covid advertising revenue has been falling for newspapers, and so were helping them drive subscriptions. Were in the process of engaging with publishers worldwide in order to make sure that the publishers and quality journalism have financial support. One of the reasons weep got into ad tech was in order to help mr. Harrison, i apologize. Im going to interrupt you because, as you know, time is limited, not through any fault of yours. But under our rules. So let me answer the question for you. The answer is, no. Google tags the courant readers and allows they will to be targeted elsewhere. Google says if you dont want to pay fair prices, ill help you target their readers still. Thats, in my view, a breach of trust. That money should be going to the news rooms not to google. Do you disagree with me . Senator, we published a blog on this and im happy to share information. They have the option to sell it directly and many do. The rates are far lower. Your questions regarding data is subject to the agreements we have with the publisher. I cant understand exactly what it is that you think were doing incorrectly with that data. Youre using their data for your benefit not for theirs or for their readers and you are driving them out of business. Maybe not financially out of business but you are engaging in conduct that cuts their payrolls. There are fewer employees at those newspapers nationwide, not just the courant and the register. Go down the list in connecticut and around the country. It is used to your benefit not the benefit of the people who own that data. Senator, respectfully i just dont see it the way youre describing it. We use revenue share with publishers so we benefit when they sell advertising. Our sole goal is to help publishers make as many as they can so we earn the share on the advertisements theyre able to sell. There is no conflict. Our interests are aligned. Maybe not from your point of view. Your interests are aligned with your company but not with theirs. Let me ask you about the system of the amp but it has an immense impact on google and on consumers. Google search, 80 market share in the United States, on publishers adoption of another google product. Amp. It did so at the time publishers finally found new tools to foster competition. When google set the rules for a. M. P. , it happened to block ad competitors and force them back into googles own products. It venal handed google a treasuretrove of data, facing a loss of 40 to 50 of incoming traffic with the top news and speed update rules unless they caved to those rules. That is a stunning abuse of google market power. Id like to know what your explanation is. Senator, we introduced what we call a. M. P. , accelerated mobile pages, which i think youre referring to, for a simple reason that when websites load slowly and in particular when the websites are making a transition to mobile environments where it was new technology and some of the pages were loading extremely slowly, it does not monetize very well. The second that it takes seconds to load, people generally move away and often it is the advertising that interferes with that load speed. We introduced a. M. P. To help publishers and give publishers a tool to allow web pages to load more quickly. And we were proud of that tool. We never architected that tool so it was a closed system. All of the tools we use in our ad tech stack have to interoperate mainly because most of the publishers with every other product thats in these systems. We didnt design a. M. P. To only work with google, so that it would somehow foreclose your access to other ways to sell your inventory. It was about trying to get pages to load faster. Weve been clear since that a. M. P. Is not required to use any of our tools. My time has expired but if we have another round of questions, i hope we can follow up. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you. Senator klobuchar has to vote so im going to let her go out of turn. I just have one question here, and i just to me this conflict, mr. Harrison, is pretty obvious, and i know you see it differently. I was thinking about the fact most of your companies arent a verb, your competitors, google it. Theyre not a verb. Youre it. And so thats fine except its not fine when you are controlling, as senator blumenthal pointed out this advertising side. You are the dominant side. Youre the dominant one to publish and to auction that people participate in when it comes to determining the advertising. One question i have, some people have actually compared the Digital Advertising to the financial trading in the Financial Markets which are, of course, regulated to prevent trading on inside information, and i know this is not how you started out as a company and are now a very successful one but at some point regulators and people trying to ensure competition have to lock at models like that to make sure theres not something that onearms your company from the other arm. Why shouldnt the Digital Advertising exchanges be regulated in a way like that . Thank you, senator. These are important questions. I think you look for regulation in a market where you see market failure and i dont want to sound like a broken record but i do not see market failure. I want you to be able to answer but when the market failure may not be as obvious when you talk about the prices for your immediate product which could have gone a lot lower, but theres a market failure for these content producers who arent able to get advertising anymore because theyre going over to you but theyre still trying to provide the content. Thats a failure of sorts, a big failure for them. Its just something that doesnt quite look like you. I would highlight that the cma, the uk market looked at this and found that most publishers used between four to seven tools. Most large publishers use 25 to 30 tools in order to sell their advertising. And the fundamental test, are they getting valuable dollars for the advertising that theyre selling and are they able to see theyre getting valuable dollars, and i think thats the case. I think you wouldnt have large Companies Like at t or verizon participate in this space if they didnt think there was a chance for them to carve out a meaningful proposition or the trade desk which grew from a billion to 20 billion in market cap in a very short period of time because they were able to carve out a good Value Proposition for them. I think theres tremendous choice. I think theres lots of competitors, i think prices have come down. I know i talked about the fact that online prices are down almost 40 over the last ten years. So i dont see the market failure that would require regulation. Im happy to keep getting these good questions. I note that we continue to invest in research and development. Almost 26 billion in 2018, which is up 10x. The reason we invest in research and development we compete vigorously for every place we have and every and the success of our products. In the u. S. , a proud u. S. Company invested almost 20 billion in that same period of time in the United States and much of the innovation is produced here. Thank you. And, again, i do not quarrel with your success or the jobs you provide. Im just looking at our job which is to make sure we are encouraging competition and we are encouraging new businesses to develop. And right now not just in your area but across the board, those businesses, startups were in a slump before the pandemic. Other companies are getting more and more dominant. To me its more than just about google. Our laws havent matched the sophistication of your company and others. Our regulators havent matched it and we are where we are and thats why i think we need to make a major overhaul. Thank you. Thank you. Of course the test isnt whether publishers are getting dollars for ad space. The test is whether the dollars they get are competitive rates or whether theyre suppressed because of anticompetitive conduct like time. Am i missing something there . I think when the uk looked at this issue they found the industry average for how much rev share for publishers was around 67 . Our tools are higher than approximately at or higher than 69 . Were certainly market competitive with the other tools out there. Okay. Lets talk about google and about youtube for a minute. Your company has a very strong position as an online publisher, particularly with respect to youtube. This is an innovation, its an asset that you have in your company that is very valuable. And if an advertiser wants to place an ad on youtube, as i understand it, please correct me if im wrong, since 2015 the policy has been that the advertiser wanting to place an advertisement on youtube has no choice but to use googles own ad buying platform. I have some questions about this about why google chose to implement this restriction and whether that doesnt have tendency to demand Side Platforms from the market. For example, lets assume, mr. Harrison, that if youtube were an independent actor and as such as an independent actor trying to maximize demand and revenue, why wouldnt youtube in that circumstance open up its inventory to as many demand Side Platforms as pop and, therefore, as many bidders as possible . Wouldnt that make sense . Senator, i think it depends on the goals of the platform, of the website. In this case, again, we were trying to balance new features we were introducing with the fact that those new features werent offered by other platforms and other inventory and, therefore, it would have been very hard to sell that inventory sidebyside. I also think, to answer your question, that there are lots of examples of Companies Choosing to selfprovision their own inventory. Facebook is an example. Snap is an example. Pinterest is an example, all companies that have not chosen to open up their inventory but to use their tools to purchase their inventory. Again, in many cases, and i know this is the case with snap and pinterest, trying to balance privacy and some of the features on privacy with the sale of advertising, very protective of that. It gives you a reason why people are choosing different ways. Those companies arent musthave properties, though. They are different than yours, right . Again, i dont know what must have in this context means the ability to reach your consumers or an advertiser to reach its consumers. These are platforms that have their specific focus but theyre very important in order to reach their to reach consumers and point to the massive amount of choice in the ecosystem if youre an advertiser and want to try to find a way to sell your product. I know you claim that advertisers might end up bidding against themselves. But the Worlds Largest technology company, that is your company, google, is capable ofs creating a workaround, to prevent that. If advertisers assuming the advertisers couldnt do it themselves. You being the worlds Biggest Technology company and the most successful one, surely could you figure that out. I mean, how is this not just sort of a cynical effort to leverage the market power of googles Properties Like search and youtube into something of a monopoly in Online Advertising . Senator, i want to point out that were not the Largest Technology company in the world. There are at least three other Technology Companies right now that are significantly larger than us. Okay. You get the point. Surely were not going to quibble here about whether or not google is a Large Technology company. I get your point if you want to split hairs there. Thats fine. My point is i dont think there arent many in the world with the skill and expertise that youve got. Right . Agreed in the areas we compete in, yes. Your question is . My question is why couldnt you just figure out a workaround for that so that they didnt end up bidding against themselves . It sounds to me like something thats not really all that difficult of a thing technically speaking to unwind. Senator, its a good question. A lot of this is a complex ecosystem. A lot of the points ive tried to make, the complexities as a result you have almost 800 participants in the ecosystem. There is an issue with the fact there are so manyrrbpaforms on one side and so many platforms on another that you have advertisers in so many platforms aggregating demand from the same sources that they end up competing with themselves. I think one of our criticisms of a tool we fully work with, when it came out it was opaque to advertisers as to how they were bidding. It was better for publishers. I dont quibble with that but it was difficult for advertisers because they didnt know where how their dollars were competing with themselves and one of our issues was to try to stitch that back together with a new product called open bidding that tried to give the transparency back to the advertisers. I think with any large ecosystem, one as complex as ad tech, the more participants you have the more likely you have the situation where advertisers can bid against themselves. In an ideal world theres one tool and perfect transparency across all of those tools to both sell and buy advertising. Thats not the state of the market today. I dont think you want us to be that one tool that would sort of solve the issue youre raising. Lets move on to a different issue. Mr. Harrison, its my understanding that google does not provide advertisers information on the effectiveness of particular ads that they run such as how many clicks an ad received or how many people who happen to click on a particular ad made a purchase, how many resulted in closing a sale. That seems like an important piece of information or an important category for advertisers to have when doing comparison shapg and making Strategic Decisions about how, when, whether, to what extent, through what platforms to advertise. From what i hear googles competitors provide or allow third parties to provide this kind of information. Will google provide advertisers with nonaggregated information about the effectiveness of particular add impressions . Senator, im surprised at this and maybe its because im not understanding you. We have whole teams dedicated to nothing but helping advertisers calculate their return on investment, rely on their advertising dollars spent. The whole reason that i think google has been able to be successful and particularly with small and medium businesses we level the scales as opposed to when Large Companies could only buy television or radio advertising, we allow Small Companies to spend very small amounts of money in order to access the advertising ecosystem. Theres a great example of a Company Called strider bikes out of south dakota that is able to use our tools to now sell 50 of their inventory internationally. Not only do we provide that capability but give them many, many tools to figure out whether theyre getting a return on their investment. Its possible that im not understanding your question but we give advertisers tremendous tools to figure out whether or not there is value in the advertising they are spending. How do you respond to those claims that you dont provide them . How do you respond to claims from advertisers that you dont give them that information. Is that just wrong . There seems to be im sorry, senator, there seems to be specific types of information theyre looking for . I dont im worried perhaps its restricted because its private. One of the claims they make is to the extent you provide with some information about it, it isnt as good, as robust or complete as what they get from your competitors. By the way, very happy to follow up with you in order to understand your question. We give advertisers as much data as we can. Its possible some of the data you are asking for relates to specific behavior of the ad as compared to specific users or aggregations of users. Were careful to protect the privacy of the people who use our platform and there is a limit on how much of that information we can share with advertisers. Okay. I see my time has expired. Senator cruz is up next. Senator cruz . Thank you, mr. Chairman. Mr. Harrison, welcome. Thank you for testifying at this hearing. This hearing. Thank you. Google is at every stage on the advertising process. They have a buying platform, on the sale side, it has an ad exchange and as the publisher. No other company that im aware of is in every space and no other company is nearly predominant. Would you agree that google plays a predominant role in buying and selling ads online. I agree we have built tools and tremendous success with our own properties and how we sell advertising on our own properties and were invested in the success of the establisher ecosystem because we think that a vibrant internet system is good for google. Whether or not the question youre asking, is whether or not were dominant. Dominant applies some sort of abuse i didnt talk about abuse. Im talking about the degree of market power you have, my any measure, google is the 800pound gorilla. Is there anybody even close . I think i think there are companies that are larger sized than this. But the idea of dominance and market power means the ability to raise prices or lower innovation and prices have fallen in our investment and innovation. 28 billion in 2018. Thats up ten x what companies do you believe are more dominant in buying and selling ads online . We have healthy competitors. Facebook is a successful company. I think amazon in being both its own ad products as well as its supply side capabilities has also proven itself to be a capable competitor. To me, thats a healthy competitive facebook and amazon are not competing with you in the search space, are they . Yes, senator. I would say that they are competing with us in the search space ive googled something today, i havent facebooked it, i havent i may have ordered something on amazon too. If im searching for something, i go to the sites for different purposes. Is that when someone wants to find out some information, when someone wants to find out what does joe biden think about taxes, they search google and the Google Search results is what they look to, is that correct . Senator, i think its a great question and if i could share, i think that we offer a general Search Engine. That is our Value Proposition and im happy that we have built a good general Search Engine. 15, 20 years ago we occupied a specific space. People compare us as a general Search Engine to other serarch engine. People decide they want to buy something, and then they have im not talking about purchasing something. If youre buying books online, amazon has a dominant position. Lets focus on you take issue with this and said google isnt abusive. Theres been some discussion about this already during the hearing. Earlier this year, google used its market position to threaten the federalist and demanded that it remove its Comment Section, that it take it down or it wouldnt be able to use google ads. If google isnt dominant, why does it have the power to demand of a media publisher it disagrees it that it take down the comments site and why does it expect media obedience. We have an ads product and that ads product has many policies that determine what we can show ad inventory against. I think if youre a someone who makes child clothes and want to sell child clothes using our system, you do not want your childrens clothes to appear next to harmful information. In the federalist case, theyre Comment Section had racist commentary in it and that violated our ads policies and so we couldnt show ads next to that content and those policies are clear, published how many other Media Outlets do you demand their pull down their comments pages . My media outline that contained offensive information like the racist information that was in the federalist, we would not show ads against. Were not asking them so google owns youtube which is a dominant media viewing platform. Youtube allows comments. There are racist and offensive comments on youtube comments. Im assuming that google does not demonetize its wholly owned subsidy youtube, is that right . We give three choices to publishers. And i will answer your question. One is they dont have a Comment Section, secondly, they put their Comment Section behind another click. A lot of large news publishers do this, like the New York Times. You click once, it takes you to a separate page and there are no ads on that page. Or third, they can choose to moderate their comments page. This is what youtube does. Youtube heavily moderates its comments page. We moved 700 million youtube comments in one quarter. We removed most comments at the 99 mark before people even see them or as soon as they appear. So we take efforts to moderate and thats why ads can show next to that. In the past two years, how many websites, how many Media Outlets has google used its market power on ads to force them to take down or change their comment page. How frequently has that happened to others . I would have to get back to you with that answer. I would point out, though, that we do receive complaints on either side of the aisle on this issue. Weve pulled down videos on the daily show, on last week tonight and democracy now and have received complaints from those sites. We operate a wide platform. It has more views than have ever been expressed in Human History on one platform and we get complaints from both sides when we use our policies. Again, clearly stated policies to pull down content. Im going to follow up for you in writing and ask you for that information and you represented that google will provide that information. Ive asked you for that information before and google has stonewalled and refused to give an answer. Im hopeful that your testimony here will be followed up on by some kind of transparency. Lets talk about youtube for a second and our time is wrapping up here. Some time ago i visited with the youtube ceo who reports to google and she described to me with respect to Steven Crowder and other conservatives libertarian comedian talk show hosts who google demonetized, she described how the left was pushing youtube to ban him all together and she sat in my office and argued that we should be happy that youtube didnt ban him, they simply demonetized him. And she thought that was a middle ground even though she conceded that he had done nothing to violate youtubes terms of service. I pointed out that the demands to censer are only coming from one side. Only from the left. We were not asking her to censer or silence socialists. Im happy for them to speak as much as they like because i think their ideas dont with stand scrutiny. Do you think its acceptable for google and youtube to engage in biased censorship by using demoney tieization to punish anyone whose speech they disagree with it. Political bias and viewpoints does not influence whether content appears or doesnt appear. We have designed our policies so that political bias is not part of the equation. We have whether its youtube or search, we have clear policies at the outset. We have a rigorous process to make sure that when we do 400,000 experiments a year my time as expired. As a final question, are you familiar with dr. Epsteins research and his conclusions that are not what you testified. I am aware of the survey. I think we found that the methodology wasnt effective and we ran our own investigations actually into the senate to figure out whether or not we could find any bias in how youtube performed or a search performed. We compared republican and democrat senators. They were very evenly balanced in terms of their engagement on youtube and so we dont we dont agree with this. The economist has reviewed both our search and found no evidence of political biased. Will you provide that study to this committee . Yes, i will. Thank you. Senator hawley. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Let me come back to this issue of ad time which is what senator lee was asking you about a moment ago. We talked about youtube and search, you have dominant positions in both of those areas and platforms and you have to use a google ad platform in order to place advertisements on search or youtube which means that an awful lot of people are using tools like google ads and dv 360. My question is, do your demandSide Platforms, do you offer volume discounts to advertisers . You mean, do largest marketers, do we provide different rates . Is that the question . Yeah, do you offer volume discounts . We do have programs that allow very large advertisers or agencies which i believe are industry standard, reduced rates. Im not sure whether that accounts as a volume discount. Have these volume commitments that are necessary in order to get the discounts, have they increased over time . Im sure that as our systems have grown, they have grown as well. Effective, increased so much that you cant actually meet the volume requirements just by advertising on youtube or search, you now actually have to use googles demand Side Platforms in order to advertise on third party platforms, isnt that correct . Im sorry, senator. Ill have to i dont know the answer to that question. It doesnt sound like its the case to me. I will need to get back to you on how that works. Wouldnt that be a problem if that were correct . Wouldnt you be using your position in youtube and in search in order to incentivize and monopolize the demand side ad market . Senator, i dont see it that way. If large advertisers, you know, brands that we know and love or agencies buy a large amount of advertising, it is a good thing for the various networks that can participate in that advertising to benefit from that increased demand. And so, yes, we and many other companies, if not other companies that sell advertising, use programs that incentivize largescale ad purchases because were in the business of selling advertising. But i dont know why that would be harmful from the perspective of our sale size platforms. It would be harmful because it gives you an advantage that nobody else has. If you have the youtube and search platforms that other companies do not have, you not only own those platforms, but as has been discussed at some length now, you control the entire ad stack from top to bottom as well. And youre using your position in search and youtube in order to give yourselves a dominant position in the ad stack and not just on the ad side, but on the supply side. As you drive so much volume onto your demand Side Platform, it creates then strong incentives on the supply side for publishers to use the supply side not least because you have tremendous amounts of consumer data and there are great efficiencies that you create if publishers will use your supply side given the volume you have driven to the demand side, right . This looks like tying to me in the antitrust context, am i wrong . I dont agree. These are small percentages that are used only with the largest advertisers. I think you will find that anyone who sells large amounts of advertising, and that would include some of our largest competitors, including competitors that operate large platforms as having similar incentives with large advertisers, i dont the idea that from a business perspective that you would encourage large buyers, you know, to buy a little bit more is seems appealing from a business perspective and ive given the choice that i outlined in terms of both publishers and advertisers being able to use different platforms and either to buy or sell advertising. I dont know where the harm is. I think the concern is, is that you control youtube and search, which are the dominant platforms. You control massive amounts of consumer data that you have harvested from your other consumerfacing platforms, gmail, google maps, gsuite, et cetera. You use those advantages in the ad stack at every single layer, every layer of which you exercise dominance in. This looks like monopoly upon monopoly in a classic case of tie. Well see. Were going to find out as these antitrust investigations proceed. But the appearance is very troubling. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Senator klobuchar. Since were still going here, i had a question on the privacy front and maybe talk a little bit about googles use of consumer data. As you know, senator cantwell and i and a number of others are trying to work out privacy legislation. Its been hard to pass and the companies for a long time have been saying, no, and then suddenly states are doing individual legislation and then all of a sudden theres a cry for federal privacy legislation to preempt the states. I get the logic but i want to make sure anything we do is as strong as possible. Google has a lot of personal data from many of its businesses that weve been discussing. Senator hawley brought up some of them, including data on location, gender, buying habits, et cetera. And the user can sense that allow google to collect this data are extremely broad and allow for practically any use. It doesnt seem like most people really understand whats going to be doing i know this feeling you get on a site, you click the box and no one really understands whats going on or what theyve consented to. First of all, two questions, this seems like a big problem to me. Do you really think people understand that and do you see why were trying to drive some kind of privacy legislation . Yes. This is as its always been a serious issue but its essentially a serious issue as were seeing legislation emerge in europe and in the u. S. First of all, from the beginning, but certainly in a renewed push over the last five to ten years, we design all of our products with choice, transparency, and control embedded in them. We try to make it as clear to users as possible what it is theyre consenting to. I take your point that it times it appears confusing. What theyre consenting to, how we use their data and they have the control whether or not they want to delete the data and were Getting Better and better. Our google have you ever done a study to see if they understand whats happening to their data and told them afterward this is what happened . Did you understand that thats what you signed up for . We have almost a billion users now that have gone to their google accounts page to check their privacy settings. We have almost 20 Million People a day going to the to their google account to check and verify their privacy settings. We just released our new version of android which is doing a much better job of making sure i just asked that. I made up the question on the spot. Have you done those studies where you asked them, do you know what you really agreed to do . We always do user studies with any change that we would make. Any one of the changes i just talked about, im sure that weve product managers have presented on it and weve tried to make choices that are in the best interest of our users. We want our users to be able to make the decision on how they control their data and how they use their data. Do you get why we have concern about your pending acquisition of fitbit because it would just be more data to add to g n googles trove of data then that continues this big data problem with one company . I do understand that you have concerns and like any acquisition that we do, that will be subject to regulatory review both in the u. S. And in europe. I want to be clear, that acquisition is not about data. And we are willing to commit and im committing today that we will never mix that data with our ads data in a way that will show ads towards users of these things. Its about i think youre wearing one. This deal is about devices. Its about health care and making sure that were providing Good Health Care and good decisions to the people who use these products and not about ads. There are companies out there that are doing a very good job and apple is one of them, of developing Innovative Products in this space. We think peoples expectations is changing and they will want watches and things to wear on their chests and glasses and thats what this deal is about. Okay. And ill ask on the record so we can get moving with our witnesses some question about dynamic allocation and the double click feature and how that may be unfair to other competitors and we can go over that later. Thank you. Thank you. Senator blackburn. Thank you so much, mr. Chairman. And mr. Harrison, thank you for being here today. I want to know, is there any single competitor to googles Online Advertising business that offers services in every level of the ad stack . There are competitors at each portion of the ad stack. But there is no single competitor that is Offering Services at every level of the ad stack. I think there are a few competitors that have tools that have the buy side and sell side tools as well tools. I will come back to you with example for companies. Thats important as we look at this issue. Because what you basically have built is a way that you are controlling the entry into that ad stack and because you are dominating at every level in that. Let me ask you about this. In 2007, googles general counsel told the u. S. Senate in the context of the double click acquisition, no control over the advertising, no ownership of the data that comes with that is collected in the process of the advertising. The data is owned by the customers, publishers and advertisers and double click or google cannot do anything with it. But in 2016, google reversed course and merged users browsing details with search history. Many stakeholders complained that google treats consumer and pricing data as its own. Very subjective on this. Do you agree that the Data Collected by google in your business double click is owned by the customers, establishers and advertisers and is not owned by google. Senator, i believe that we need to provide our users with control over their data, clear control over their data and consent and we require their consent when we want to make different uses of that data. In the case that youre talking about, we did make changes in 2016 about how double click data operated in google data operated. We got the consent of all of our users to any changes we made. If they did not con i present the question to you this way, when youre using a Google Service online, who owns your virtual you . Is it the user or google . Users own their data and we do as we have instituted a whole bunch of tools to make sure that the choices theyre making, that the uses are transparent to them and so they can control. You could go onto your google account right now, assuming youre a google user and delete your data. Let me ask you this. Does a google collect and retain any of my data when i am using your service . Do you collect it and do you retain any user data . And do you collect any of this from thirdparty websites that i may go on and search a website through Google Search . Senator, its a broad question. To the extent that we collect data on a user, a signedin user, we make sure that user knows that weve collected it and give them the control to change that or delete it if they want to. Let me ask you this, you know, you could look at your service and say, well, you all have some conflicts of interest when it comes to googles Advertising Technology services. And are you how will your Advertising Technology Services Play by the same rules as other thirdparty Advertising Technology services if you say you have these competitors within the ad stack . So at each part of that journey across the ad tech stack, there are many different participants. Ive listed off the participants. But large Companies Like at t, verizon, amazon, Small Companies, although theyre growing quickly, they have a specific Value Proposition. They have their own data that they bring together in order to define that and they compete with each other to derive either the best value for advertisers or the best value for publishers. The rules are the rules which are market rules are designed to make sure that people enter into agreements that make the most money for the website if youre a publisher or generate a return on our investment. Theyre the market is operating effectively to make sure both sides of that get the value. Its working effectively for you and google but i think that you all should be providing some assurance that, you know, with chrome, with their use, that youre going to create a fair ecosystem and not preference the google ads. I think for many users you have not been able to do that. Thank you for being us today, mr. Chairman. And i yield back. Senator blumenthal. Thanks so much, chairman. And i really want to thank you and the Ranking Member for having this hearing. I think its been extremely enlightening and i think youre willingness to have this very Frank Exchange is very important. You know, in a sense all business like all politics is local. So let me bring this down to a very local level. I was at the long wharf theater yesterday in new haven, well known to many of us who have some connection to yale in new haven. When the theater wants to discuss in one of the local papers, the register sells an ad on spaces other than google. Lets say the theater puts a maximum bid on google ads for 10 and google sells the ad spot for to them for 9. Google might find that ad on its exchange for a lower price. Lets say 4. Google then keeps the spread between those two auctions. The benefit doesnt go to the long wharf and it doesnt go to the publishers of those newspapers. The uk competition and market Authority Found that google is keeping the spread. Doesnt that strike you as an abuse of market power . Senator, first of all, im not aware of that finding of the cma. Secondly, we have ever since we started all of our ad products, we have been relentlessly focused to make sure they got a return on investment on what it was they were advertising. We know that over the long run, in order to keep Small Businesses like what youre talking about interested in using our services, they have to see return on the investment that they make. And if they are overpaying for advertising, then perhaps a publisher wins in that moment. But over the long haul, that will actually do damage to both their faiths in the advertising systems as well as their faith in google. That was a finding and i apologize for interrupting. But im limited in time and we have another panel. Of the uk officials. Let me go onto another area of what i think is a very grave conflict of interest. Google competes with publishers to sell ad space and increasing portion of advertising revenue is being directed toward search, youtube and other google properties. Given that google operates the exchange and it competes with publishers on that exchange, that is a classic risk of insider trading. If you compare it as google has to the stock market, google would have been prosecuted long ago for insider trading. Let me just ask you, mr. Harrison, has google ever used the Data Collected about publishers and their readers to develop products or steer advertising revenue toward its own properties . Senator, first of all, at a higher level, i dont we dont were were invested in ad tech where were trying to increase the vibrancy of that ecosystem. Its a powerful incentive, rev share agreements mean, that we make 10 cents, 15 cents and thats a powerful reason to make sure theyre maximizing the value of their inventory. Not only because of that, we think if there are many news publishers, people will use google to find news content, if there are many retailers, people will use google to find goods and services. And so to answer your specific question, it is sometimes complex to talk about data and so i dont have a precise answer and im willing to follow up. The way you described it, that doesnt sound like we would use that data to advantage the selling of search ads. Most search ads are connected to the context of the search itself. You look at the query, you look at the words in the query and you look to match the ad with whats being asked for. That is i dont want to give a that is a large amount of the formula by which we serve search ads and nothing to do with the data. Is it your testimony to this committee that google has never emer merged or used data for its own commercial benefit. Im sorry. Its a broad question that i dont i cant say yes or no to it. I could i think thats precisely what is at issue here. That in fact, you have used that data for the benefit of developing new products or steering advertising revenue toward your own properties and i think that, again, goes to the heart of the kind of antitrust standards that have to be enforced here. Has google ever changed its products to steer investors or Better Direct them away from the open web and toward its own content . Senator, to just quickly pick up your point, i meet with news publishers all the time but im not aware of that accusation. Again, i am willing and will follow up with you on it. I appreciate that. Im sorry. Repeat your second the question has google ever changed its products to Better Direct its visitors away from the open web and toward its own content . I think in to answer your question, in 1999, 2001, we had a very simple product which was ten blue links, these were websites arranged in order of how our search algorithm believed that they should be presented in terms of relevancy to the person that was asking the question. Over time, we show a map. If youre asking for where is a gas station near me or a local restaurant, we if youre asking a simple mathematical question, we might show a calculator. If youre asking a question about a location again, we may show a map. If youre asking about a restaurant, we may put that restaurant in the context of an area around you. These are improvements to search that we think have made search better, more relevant. On mobile phones, its particularly important because you have very small real estate and we have to make sure you get the right answer at the right time. These have increased the health and innovativeness of our Search Engine. I dont i know that people out there have complained that sometimes that diverts. We think its a better search experience and a natural search experience in order to as technology has developed and has peoples expectations have changed. Thank you for that answer. My time is expired. I want to say this is not a criticizi criticism of your products or your businesses. It is its very, very grave doubts about how those businesses are put together and how the power that they give you is used to benefit the Company Rather than consumers and potentially stifle innovation. And i think it is classically the function of antitrust law to protect competition and consumers which is what will be necessary in a court of law. Thanks, mr. Chairman. Thank you, senator blumenthal. Weve got a second panel of witnesses that has waited patiently for quite a long time. Ive got one more question for you, mr. Harrison, and i will, in the interest of time, choose to direct the reminder of my questions to you in writing and for the record. Before we go to our final panel, mr. Harrison, in your written testimony you make the point that prices for digital advertisements have dropped by 40 over the last ten years. But isnt arguably the more important metric, the more relevant metric a different one, one that focuses on how much advertisers have to spend to achieve the same number of sales. In other words, what good is it to say that advertisers are paying less money per ad if they have to buy more of those same ads for each conversion to a sale . Senator, its a good question. I think that if you look at the percentage of advertising in gdp, if you go back 20 years, it was almost 1. 4 of gdp. Now its 1 of gdp. In aggregate, choice has improved. Advertisers are able to get their products to market and advertise those products easier and more Cost Effective than they were in the past. I think youre asking the right question. I think that weve seen not only a fall in advertising ad tech fees, i think weve seen the fact that advertising as a cost to small and medium and Large Businesses in the u. S. Has fallen in aggregate. Okay. All right. Like i say, ive got a number of additional questions for you if thats all right. Ill send those to you in writing so we can move along to our next panel and hear from them. Thank you very much, mr. Harrison. Thank you. Now with regard to our second panel, youre at the table. If youll stand and be sworn. Do you affirm that the testimony youre about to give to the committee will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you god . Yes, i do. Thank you. Okay. Ordinarily what we would do at this moment, i would give each of you a brief production. It ends up taking five or ten minutes for me to complete those. Given we may end up having a vote, we want to avoid leaving you all hanging if we can. Im going to only in the interest of time and for your convenience dispense with that introduction and i assume that in your opening marks youll be able to tell us a little bit about yourself and we know who you are. So well hand it over to you now. Well go first to mr. Heimlich and move to our right after that. Go ahead. Thank you. Push the red button, if you will. How is that . All right. Right now there are americans thinking about switching their mobile Service Provider or buying a used car, refinancing their mortgage, joining a virtual gym or subscribing to an app. Businesses need to reach these people. Traditionally the only way to reach an audience involved wasting tons of money. Digital we aspire to not waste any money. Using powerful software and anonymous data, we try to limit advertising to the audience who cares about our ads message. We experiment to find the conditions were being exposed to our ad makes a difference in what consumers decide to do. Thats been my job for 20 years. Using technology to make advertising more productive, relevant and timely. When the toughest part of that job is convincing firms to reallocate budgets from traditional advertising like tv to digital, google was a great ally. But as Digital Advertising matured into distinction markets for search, display and social, google changed. The company lagged behind the pace of innovation and display. Google was not a key player in the invention of ad exchanges, the most Important Development in digital since 2010. The ability to be precisely effective in display depends on ad exchanges. Exchanges allow buyers and sellers to connect and make the best deal for each of us without friction a million times a second. Display auctions occur as you load a web page. Its because of Exchange Transactions that any creator can monetize the attention he earns and any business can maximum the impact of its ad dollars. It thrived as long as its participants were interested in a level Playing Field. We agreed its best to operate with competitors on fair and equal terms so customers can mix and match products at will and the best ideas win. The echo system is nicknamed the open web because its a free market. A company has to be confident to operate in this mode. Customers can easily compare your features, quality and price with other salerellers. Other investigations have produced clues of googles strategy for ad exchanges. Google saw the efficiency of exchanges as a threat to googles primary business, selling ads. The ad exchanges were set up to be agnostic brokers like stock exchanges. A 2010 internal email called this a risk. Googles concern was the less they were in the middle of transactions, than the fewer dollars would end up in googles hand. Their plan was to combine products so it can resolve any conflicts of interest. It would use its market powers in the ecosystem to discourage Comparison Shopping against best in class solutions. A great new bidder is less enticing if your bidder has ties on our server. Google never caught up. Instead it leveraged its market power to slow the base of innovation and display and make Exchange Buying less attractive to advertisers. They tied their products in a web extensive enough to entangle the entire marketplace. They broke the privacy standard by linking consumers names from gmail to the i. D. Numbers assigned to browsers for what had been Anonymous Exchange contractions. Google came up with new ways to pollute the ecosystem they used to embrace. It made the open web less efficient for buyers and sellers. Google tightened ties allow the broker was no longer one among a set of competitors. It was not hobbled by the restrictions it had placed on everyone else. The power to interoperate among buy side, sell side and Measurement Software went from being a feature to a capability exclusive to google. Now progress on innovation is squeezed to the margins of the industry and new add tech is rare. The more efficient the ad market, the more likely it is that superior new products will find customers and thrive. When the ad exchanges function properly, the size advantage from flooding the airwaves is offset by quieter voices speaking to whoever is most open to any given improvement. This tilts the incentives of every business. Google is dominating display by breaking inoperability. Pre2016 under pressure, ad exchanges were becoming more transparent and privacy respectful as the we cecosystem grew. There was nothing to stop google from exiting the arena or competing within its open standards. Whether or not google competes with other firms is irrelevant to the harms theyve caused publishers, platforms, and Small Businesses like mine in the 50 billion open web display market. It was efficient when publishers platforms, measurement tools and Service Providers interoperated. Operators could access a global marketplace of thousands of buyers and sellers quickly at low cost. Small businesses with great ideas had a short ramp to success. Now funding for ad Tech Startups has been drying up and the pace of innovation slowed down. The number one concern i hear is googles domination of the market my Company Operates in. Theyve been breaking existing efficiencies and preventing the development of new ones. Many expect google to mislead regulators about its conduct in the open web and im grateful for the opportunity to scrutinize their claims. For the sake of competition and the benefit it brings, google should be forced to exit the market or compete within its own standards. Thanks. Mr. Dinelli. Thank you, chairman lee, and the other members for conducting this hearing today. Im testifying on behalf of a social change venture dedicated to ensuring that Technology Companies contribute to society in an economy that is fair, equitable and safe. Specifically, im here today to explain why it appears likely that google has violated current antitrust law by monopolizing the market for digital display advertising. Im not a technologist. Im a litigator who represent clients in antitrust disputes. I represented antitrust plaintiffs and ive represented antitrust defendants. My expertise to the extent i have any is determining whether private actors have violated the United States antitrust laws. I have no ideological or financial skin in this particular game. This is what we know about this market. Millions and millions of times each day someone in america opens a web page on their mobile phone or their laptop and portions of those pages are populated with Digital Advertising. Its a very big business. Some estimates are that in the United States, 139 billion was spent in this market in 2019. Thats a lot of money. Moreover as weve heard today, this business has profound effects for publishers, advertisers and consumers. For example, Online Advertising is the life blood for many websites and other publishers. As just one example that already has been discussed today, we all know that newspaper circulation has fallen as more and more people get their news online. Outlets in each of your districts, some of which have been mentioned today, whether it be the news in salt lake city, the hartford current or the voice of the greatest county in america, they all depend on Digital Advertising. Small businesses across the country rely on Digital Advertising to grow and thrive. Health care providers, car dealerships, moving companies, restaurants, and we expect that this need will only increase during the economic recovery. It can be good for consumers, it gives information on products and services being advertising and it reduces their search costs. Its critical to our economy and to our democracy. And as i indicated in my written testimony, i coauthored a series of papers about the two large digital platforms that are supported by Online Advertising, google and facebook. We relied on information made public by the uks cma. Our analysis led us to conclude theres a strong basis to believe that google has illegally monopolized and or maintained a monopoly in the market for Digital Advertising. Specifically we concluded that google developed a dominant Search Engine and used that position to extend into what is called the ad tech stack. The various technological functions that match. Google occupies every layer of this ad tech stack with market shares as high as 90 . From the standpoint of an antitrust lawyer, this is a big red flag. Im aware of no other market in which a single firm represents buyers and sellers and determines who buys what and at what price. Moreover, google appears to have undertaken a series of efforts to use its market position and advantages to exclude competitors. The end result is that if youre an advertiser or if you are a establishers, all roads lead to google. We describe 20 different instances of anticompetitive conduct in our paper including googles decision to make its youtube intventory available to its advertisers. We talked about that today. In our paper we describe less obvious examples of anticompetitive conduct, unfair auction design, denial of inoperability. We have heard google today assert that the market is thriving, there are many players, that the prices have gone down and it has cited inincreased innovation. Let me preview my response by saying this, these are precisely the sorts of arguments that nearly every antitrust defendant trots out whenever its accused of any sort of wrongdoing. Theres nothing new here. Zboo google says it faces vigorous competition a competition. But thats a company that holds a monopoly in billboards defending itself by saying advertisers could buy magazine inserts instead. Its not a defense. Google says that Digital Advertising prices have gone down and output has increased. As an antitrust lawyer, im concerned with what the world would look like if google had not monopolized this market and excluded its competitors. The questions are how much lower would prices have fallen . What innovations might google or others have deployed if google had faced real competition at the various layers of the ad tech stack. What Service Improvements such as privacy protections would that Platform Market offer . Would local news outlets be getting a ambitionbigger piece pie . We dont know what this would look like. But my hope is that the reminder of this hearing will be an exploration of how we might get to that world through a combination of antitrust enforcement, legislative fixes and regulation. Im happy to answer questions about this path forward and i thank you. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Ranking member klobuchar, members of the committee. Im Vice President and general counsel of net choice. Im very excited to be here because i really appreciate as a law professor, especially what the Judiciary Committee does and, you know, working in this area im very excited because, mr. Chairman, you started by talking about the importance of the consumer welfare standard that we have here in the United States. Now we didnt achieve and come to the consumer welfare standard for antitrust law at the outset. It took a us a while. We tried other systems and we found that the standards are the best one. In fact, antitrust experts from across the political spectrum recognize the consumer welfare standard is the best standard for the world. Why is that . Well, thats because its an objective standard, we base it on economics and facts. We dont base it on feelings, opinions or innuendo. At home, i play board games with my son and somehow the rules always change in the middle of the game. And they always change in a way that benefits my son. We call that the aiden rule. Here we see efforts, we see it in europe, antitech advocates to do the aiden rule. They want to change antitrust law away from the clear objective standard that we have today to a subjective, i know it when i see it standard. Why is that bad . Youre swinging a sledgehammer of antitrust law to the benefit of corporate competitors or populous policies. Lets use an example. If we open up antitrust law away from the consumer welfare standard to a i know it when i see it, its weaponization of antitrust for political purposes. Half the dais probably is angry at google because it moderates too much, half the dais is probably angry at google because it doesnt moderate enough. But we have an objective antitrust standard that does not allow political policies to interrupt the free flow of enterprise. Now, so what is the consumer welfare standard, we talked about antitrust a lot, but we havent established what the three factors are that must be proven, one, market power, two, abuse of the market power, and three, consumer harm. Now, if you look at what happened just a month ago over at the house Judiciary Committee, there was no real showing of market power. It was just stated, you are dominant. Therefore, youre dominant. And likewise, this wasnt an effort to show consumer harm because at the end of the day there really isnt. So lets look at what is market power. It all comes down to how you define the market. Weve talked a lot about the cma report. I think even the cma, if you really ask them, would recognize its a wildly flawed report. It uses the phrase might over 100 times. Its based on data that they used only in the uk and one of the things that they did was, they narrowed the definition of market so small that it produced the outcome that they sought. Dominance of google. So what is the market then . Well the market actually is all advertising because you have to look at it in the consumer welfare standard in the eyes of the consumer. What are they doing . Theyre using their time differently. So lets look back at this past sunday. Football is on. You see commercials. Youre watching the game on your tv. Youre following it on espn. Com. You might be listening to it on the radio. At that same time, advertisers simultaneously competing across three different advertising platforms. So its hard to narrow the market all the way down to google in a scenario like that. Second, even if we were to narrow it down to just digital ads, lets look at total revenue. If we look at total revenue, google is a third, facebook is a quarter, and amazon is 10 who is actually taking market share away from google. None of them come anywhere near the Supreme Court required 75 market power. Lets look at consumer harm. To us consumers, we get amazing free services. So we benefit. Two advertisers, advertising prices have plummeted. They are down 40 . Thats an indisputable fact. Could they be lower . Maybe. Are they lower than they otherwise would have been, yes. Lets look at publishers now. Publishers who otherwise couldnt sell unused add space can sell it away and they do this on a multitude of platforms. We have heard that google is the alpha and omega of the supply and demand side of the equation. We talked about the difficulties being seen at the star tribune and the current. The star tribune does use google for advertising. But it also uses at least half a dozen other platforms simultaneously. These include Companies Like rubicon, pub magic and verizon media. They use google but they use another half dozen different advertising platforms including rubicon and others. The New York Times and Washington Post are so effective that theyve actually abandoned thirdparty advertising systems and have returned to inhouse ads. So its hard to see how publishers are be holden to google and how google has this market power when these advertisers are using multiple platforms when the publishers are using simultaneously multiple platforms. So since there is no market power when you actually look at the real market, which is digital ads, since theres clearly no consumer harm, then we have to ask ourselves what are we trying to accomplish . Are we trying to convict somebody because theyre big and successful or apply the consumer welfare standard which represents putting consumers first, not coordinationrporatio the standard that should be used which shows that frankly theres not a case against google. Thank you, mr. Chairman, and members of the committee and we welcome your questions. Thanks so much. I appreciate your opening remarks and well begin our sevenminute rounds alternating between members of each party. In your written testimony you seem to suggest that google has not violated antitrust laws because customers have benefitted from its products and its services. But thats its not really what the consumer welfare standard means, is it . A consumer welfare standard is part of the analysis performed by enforcers of our antitrust laws and under the rule of reason which really involves a balancing test that weighs the harm from exclusionary conduct against any pro competitive benefits of the same conduct. Is that accurate so far . Youre not disagreeing with me so far . This means that when assessing those harms and those benefits, we look at the aggregate impact of those harms and those benefits on customers and consumers. And not social justice goals or arbitrary measurements of size or of concentration. So, its easy to make the statement generally that google has benefitted consumers. But are all of those benefits a direct result of their alleged conduct. And do they outweigh the harm from that conduct . So, mr. Chairman, i dont think that theres a tying situation here. So, one of the things that i dont think is fully appreciated and something that i didnt appreciate when i first got into this whole area, is that when you use one side of the google ad stack, you can just use that one side. You dont have to use the entire stack. So, a similar analogy would be like buying a home. I can find a realtor to help me buy a home. I can use a realtor to sell my home. But i dont use the same person on both sides of the equation. The google ad stack operates similarly where you can use one end of the ad stack and not be tied into using the other side of the equation. So, even if you side with google in that analysis, you do agree, dont you, that applying the consumer welfare standard doesnt give you a freeby card to google. Thats not the end of the analysis, right . The fact is to show consumer hard. The facts laid out show that ad prices have decreased substantially. You can show that publishers are generating revenue that they otherwise wouldnt. And then finally you can show that you and me and other consumers get free products. So, we need to identify consumer harm which i dont think has been espoused in raw data. Okay, but if google has monopolied power in a welldefined power and if it is engaged in tying one product to another product and its done so with the intent with the effect rather of maintaining the monopoly in the market to the detriment of consumers. That is a violation of section two of the sherman act, correct sf. Yes, if google did all those three things, that would satisfy each element of antitrust law. You know, its not about tying the two sides to the platform, tying the two sides of the platform. Its tying the first party ads and the Third Party Ads for advertisers. And the harm within, be it a Higher Quality adjusted price for the consumers and for the advertisers, is that true. Do you disagree with me on that . Once again, we need to show that theres been an actual loss of revenue for each of them. So, one of the things thats been shown and this came out of the cma report googles ad percentage is about 30 . And what that actually is is its below some of their other competitors. Now, if they were a monopoly, then they could actually price above competitors. And thats not what were seeing in the market itself. So, the statement of these prices are higher for consumers isnt really being bourn by the facts that were seeing on the ground. Okay, so were not necessarily looking at a loss of revenue. But couldnt that be worse off compared to a butfor world . Couldnt they be worse off in other ways, not necessarily resulting in a loss of revenue . So, but for google being there, you would see potentially higher prices on different platforms. Now, one of the things that i think has not been made clear is advertisers do not use just one platform to advertise. They use simultaneous. 4 to 6, i think is usually the number that came out of the uk simultaneous platforms. If google is not getting the best bid, then the advertisement will go to a different ad platform to be placed. So, you have competition amidst those platforms. Is pricing by competitors been skewed by googles time. I think it has been skewed. Its been skewed down because theyre creating a quality product, which is forcing competitors to compete on price. Whats your response to this . And how do you see this analysis shaking out . Do you agree that the consumer welfare standard is the right tool here . Thank you, senator. Its an adequate tool to bring enforcement action in this case. The cma recognized a number of harms to consumers. Let me list just some of them. Assuming that the analysis is correct that google is acting az monopolist in the Digital Advertising market, that means that it can raise its prices above the competitor level to the advertisers and pay a lower price to the publishers. We have heard that prices went down, and isnt it a good thing . Yes, it is. But we dont know it would have been absent that conduct. Assuming both sides are worse than they would have been, we can deduce and observe consumer harm. For example, if advertisers are paying higher than competitive prices, then economic theory and u. S. Law would allow us to presume that theyre passing at least some of that down to their customers in the form of higher prices for their products and their services. If publishers are receiving a lower amount of the advertising spend than they would in a competitive market, then both u. S. Law and economic theory presume that they will invest less in their content creation, yielding a lower quality of, for example, local news reporting to consumers. Finally, because google can control what ads are served at what frequency and where, google has the ability, for example, to oversaturate websites with irrelevant or bad ads. Weve heard we have free access to websites. Thats true. But if our quality adjusted price is higher because were getting too many or bad ads, that too is cognizable consumer harm under u. S. Law. Okay. Im out of time for this round. Were going to go to senator klobuchar next. Thank you very much, mr. Chairman. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this panel, but i was thinking of my daughters words. I have a lot. Thats what she said, mom, thats a lot. I have to i just cant let it go without starting with your argument that this should all go down to the consumer welfare standard. And i think mr. Dinelli may have some comments on that. When you really look at whats going on with antitrust law as a whole, you have a situation where incredibly conservative courts have interpreted the laws in certain ways, really based on a consumer welfare standard, that, by the way, as you said, is applied all over the world. Yet, as far as google and other countries that use consumer welfare standard, theyve decided they should investigate and should do something about it using the terms consumer welfare standard. So, lets put that aside. If we just in the antitrust area say everything is fine when i was looking at this experts have looked at a 15year period ending about ten years ago and found that plaintiffs were 0 of 16 in bringing antitrust cases in front of the u. S. Supreme court under the conservative bjork interpretation of what consumer welfare means. And i just want to remind all of us, and senator lee and i probably disagree about this. But when bjork talked about consumer welfare, he expressed the view that the only legitimate goal of american antitrust is the maximization of consumer welfare. That sounds great. But, in fact, he defined it as minimizing restrictions of output and permitting efficiency, however gained, to have its way. He equated consumer welfare not with welfare for actual living, breathing consumers but with pure efficiency, and quote, the maximization of wealth. I just want to make it clear when i look at how these cases have come down and then the views that Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh have brought to the court, more and more decisions are being made to not bring antitrust cases. And that is the very reason that i believe, yes, we should up our enforcement. And that is part of the work that senator grassley and i are doing and others on this committee to add resources to the ftc or the Justice Department or we are never going to be able to take on the issues of our time. And yes, we should do our best to use the laws we have. But i am sorry. When you look at the changing economy and whats happening, throughout history, sherman act was not a static act. They added the clayton act. They added multiple bills over time to try to get at what was happening. So, i just think relying on the courts right now when you look at every decision to illinois brick, you cant say that oh, this is going to be taken care of. Goog and the facebook issues are just going to be taken care of by the consumer welfare standards given how the courts are determining it. I want to get to my google questions. Thank you, senator. Im clearly going to disagree with you because i do believe the consumer welfare standard is the best approach. The fact that its been 120 at the Supreme Court is not indicative of a failed standard. Its potentially indicative of a flawed prosecution or in the most case its usually civil suits belichick tr suits. One of the things it has done is its given america the bedrock of some of the greatest innovations in the world. The u. S. Is somewhat unique with its consumer welfare standard. Europe does have a different standard of a, i know it when i see it. I would also note that europe is fundamentally different. I would not say europe is terribly innovated, especially in the tech space. Their main innovation would be, what, spotify . Second, europe has a fundamentally different civil suit functionality where they operate under the english rule. The english rule, unlike in the United States, is a loser pays model. And that helps to eliminate frivolous lawsuits that waste time, court time, taxpayer dollars, and defendants money. So, if we were to even consider heading down in the european model and away from the consumer welfare standard, we must be ready to take on the decrease in innovation and the basically i think there was a decrease in innovation when we broke up at t . So, at t i dont think is a spot on example. The reason i say that is at t was a governmentcreated monopoly to begin with. They allowed a lot of the local telecos to consolidate and approved them because they were the main ones. I dont think at t is a good example of break up and subsequent innovation. Okay. Mr. Dinelli, do you want to respond . And also do you think legislation, like the bill that i have to update the antitrust laws, would help enforcers address a type of exclusionary conduct that were referring to here today in the hearing . Thank you, senator. I do agree that this new economy in which we live requires a multitude of tools. It requires enhanced enforcement. It requires some legislative changes, including some of those that you, yourself, have authored and proposed. I also think that this new economy could require new regulatory powers either to existing or to new regular la toy rs. On the point of consumer welfare, i agree with the senator, that this is a standard that sometimes has not served us well. My point was simply to say that should not stop the prosecution of google which so obvious is a monopolist agreed. With the respect to the break up of at t, for example, i would agree that that did lead to innovation. But that came about in the context of regulation, in which the Telephone Companies were, for example, required to interoperate. Thats the kind of thing that might help solve the problems in this market as well. Very good point. Mr. Highland, thank you for testifying. I found this really interesting, your perspective. And i was thinking, as i listened to you, i wondered what questions you would have asked mr. Harrison if you were sitting up here because i know it must be frustrating to be in your position and hear senators asking a ton of questions. As good as we are we are too. Without maybe having the kind of experience that you have. So, could you talk a little bit about that and what other things you think we need to get at and what your reactions were and what your come backs would have been to mr. Harrisons statements about how prices are going down and everything is good and they dont really have market dominance because theyre using other places to advertise, as we just heard. Whats your reaction to all that . Thank you, senator. And thank you for having me. So, the one that really jumps out at me that kind of got glossed off is mr. Harrison said that Header Bidding was good for publishers. He just kind of threw that away. Its hard to get your head around the but for world. It was a hack thrown together by a few google competitors to break the dominance of googles cell Side Platform. Specifically publishers wanted all the demand sources to compete directly in a unified auction and google refused to do that. Header bidding was a hack that put all the bids in a header so he could compete. Two things happened. Publishers made 20 to 30 more money. Me on the buy side, i didnt see a hit. So, what that tells you is that money was going somewhere else. It was either in the middle or we experienced it as a quality increase. It stopped skimming when these headers went into place. I would love for everyone to dig in on that rare example of the butfor world. And Header Bidding was night full blown solution. If amazon who was involved in header building or nexxus were able to develop a product instead of a javascript that created the headers, i think that would have been much more powerful. Thats ,os c an example of goog failing to dominate. On the definition of the industry, im not a lawyer, but i think it would be helpful for the lawyers to understand that programattic advertising has its own teams, own budgets, own ad formats. Peoples titles are programattic. There isnt money moving from social and billboards and tv into programattic willy nilly. Theres a programattic fruk production, programattic teams. Its not to be glossed over as a footnote in advertising. As far as i know without claiming to understand the legal definition, its a market. And google dominates when you see those 90 and 60 . Thats my experience of what it is like to operate in that market. Now, prices going down. The biggest reason prices go down is because mobile advertising is cheaper and mobile advertising has become a much, much bigger share. If you dont normalize for the growth of mobile, prices going down is meaningless. Also what came up is the quality difference. If quality is going down and prices are going down, thats not good at all, right . So, i believe economists have shown that cream skimming causes all prices to go down. So, my experience as a buyer, if you experience that the quality is going down, you dont know anyone whos cream scheming but you know someone who used to pay 4 for this and now its not worth four anymore. Im going to bid to three. I think mr. Zappo made a statement that said google forced to compete on price. Google is gaming auctions, winning with lower prices, which forced everyone to build down. Then they claim it as a win that all the prices are down. Thats why senator blumenthal is so upset. Google can scream skim and use the huge day coming from places that have nothing to do with ad tech and the refusal of the process. Its a skim scream. What do you think would be the best way to fix it . When i read about u. S. Versus microsoft and how forced interoperability was part of that, i said heres the clear precedent. Microsoft had private apis into windows and they had to open them up so anybody who wanted to build an application for windows could. To me thats a clear precedent for what should work. I think google with acquiesce to that and i think the solution should be they exit this marketplace and be like companys that run complete gardens and let the open place compete with them. Mr. Dinelli, do you want to add to that . I would go back to the point of interoperability, senator. Another option would be data markets. Right now, google is using the threat of privacy litigation and the actuality of privacy regulation in europe as an execution to claim that theres no way that it could open itself up so that others could learn from the data that it gathers from its various consumerfacing products. It hordes that data forrist. There were questions to mr. Harrison about the amount of data and the kind of data that advertisers can access about where their money goes and what happens to their ads. What google has done is created something called the google ads hub. What it does is it allows you basically to go into a clean room and look at data that google has about you and your advertising campaigns, but you cant take it out. Nor could a competitor gain access to that. In a true functioning market, there could be requirements the data be sold on fair conditions and prices to competitors to allow them to come in, use some of that data, which google has said belongs to the users, not to google. And then use that data for the benefit of the market. Very good. Senator lee. Thank you. Lets turn to you now. In his testimony, mr. Harrison said that googles ad tech is interoperable with its competitors technology. Is that your experience . Well, there are many cases where its not. There are some cases where it is, but many, many cases where its not. And there have been extensively documented. So, its frustrating that google keeps saying that when theres so much documentation of the cases where they refuse to interoperate. I can talk about some of the ones that have been talked about least. I think the byside server is the most nefarious that hasnt been publicized. It is like a referee in the competition of buying. The buy side ad server is a hub and all the others are spokes and it points to the spokes that produced every sell. This one did this, this one did that. Google is that referee but theyre the competitor. This is the market where they have 90 share. So, they have 90 share. I cant really get another ad server. No one can compete. Its the only that integrates with search in youtube. So, even if im going to use googles ad server and say i dont want you to do that referee thing, i dont trust you to be the vendor. You used to be able to download all the ad interaction data out of there and send it to your partners and say you go to data so you can see how googles refereeing and make sure you get as much credit as you can. As of 2018 you cant even do that. Me as a advertiser, thats my data. I licensed googles ad server to be the hub. It keeps data on every ad interaction. Not only do i want to be able to download it. I want an api out of that thats going to the dsp so everyone can see the ad and no one has gaming in competition for who gets credit. The measurement market, thats a market that doesnt come up when we talk about advertising markets. Its significant too. Its determinant of who else gets money, of whos perceived of being able to win. Google massively dominates it and they control it in a way that could be easily solved. All the interaction data can go wherever you want and that would solve the problem on others. I hear that google is proposed blocking third Party Tracking in its chrome browser and that this could be the equivalent, the rule is already in effect, for apple, safari, and Mozillas Firefox browsers. What can you tell us what you know about this and how it can affect digital ads and whether you think this is equivalent . Thank you, senator. Thats a great question. The answer is no, its not the same. Its an example of how google is weaponizing privacy regulations. Theyre supposed to protect consumers. Our privacy laws say if youre doing business with a company, they can use your data for advertising. Its why your bank is always sending you credit card offers and offers for loans. If you dont like it, you can not work with that bank. You cant opt out. The laws say you gave them the data and they can use it. What the laws can handle is someone like google using the data you gave them to do business with them in a totally different context. You give data to use search and theyre using it to cream skim off the hartford server. Theyre saying no one can track. Google cant track. Competitors cant track. Its going to be a level Playing Field in safari, in firefox. None of this nonsense of bringing data youve collected from god knows where into our browser. Google is going to maintain the ability to track. Theyre going to block other peoples cookies, but theres a still chrome log in, maps log in, android log in, and privacy policies made clear they merged all the data into super profiles and theres no meaningful barrier to them using all that data to have what would amount to a massive, massive advantage on options in the chrome browser. Mr. Sabo, do you want to answer that one as well . Yes, one of the things that was mentioned earlier by senator klobuchar is the increased concern about privacy. Chrome is a browser that competes heavily with safari. Brave is a new one that has entered the marketplace. And what does safari, mozilla, and brave feature . They feature privacy. So, google, in suit, because its a competitive environment on chrome, has enabled privacy as a core feature of its browser. Now, thats being turned into a antitrust action because kind of like hammer, everything looks like a nail. And every action to someone who doesnt like google is clearly an antitrust violation. Thats not whats happening with chrome. Second is why does it track you . Well, because that way it can better optimize my results. And thats something i can opt out of and deactivate and go incognito. Why did chrome make the move . Because of robust competition in the web browser space and because its competitors are fighting on privacy. It sounds like something we want to encourage platforms to do. Google is doing it. But now its being used by people who dont like it as a sign of anticompetitive behavior. So, thats a real kind of vice that these platforms and businesses are being put in. Can you tell us what the market looks like for ad agencies working on behalf of advertisers . Are they free to use any software that they choose . Im really happy to be able to address. Thank you senator. My job at a large agency was choosing the buy Side Platforms. I had a deep partnership with one called the trade desk. I had a colleague at another ad agencies and others in the industry. We all had this same experience involving the agencys youtube commitments. As mr. Szabo said, theres nothing unusual about a commitment where you get a certain amount of youtube. It was Something Like a billion dollars. Buy a billion dollars of youtube, get the 10 up front rate and thats really important for the agencys competition against other agencies because big advertisers ask whats your youtube rate just like they ask whats your nbc rate. They understand that as part of negotiating power. Two weird things about the deals though. You can meet your commitment for a billion dollars by also moving money through db 360. Thats weird. Thats usually not tied like that. The other weird thing is the deal is increased 100 a year. 8 billion were supposed to spend in youtube. You cant buy that much youtube. What happened to me and colleagues at other agencies is the ceo called us and said you need to put money into db 360 immediately. Take it out of trade desk. I dont care what trade desk is. You need to move this money into db 360 because our google rep just called me and said theyre going to claw back the rate and were going to owe them 900 million if you dont move this money over now. And my response would be like this is a huge problem. I sold my clients into what i told them was the best platform for them . How am i supposed to tell them now were going to use db 360 which i told them convincingly as everyone knew this is an inferior dsp. Now i have no choice. Now i have to use db 360. So, it was a favor to me that it gave me cover for doing what i never should have done, but that was how db 360 got a foothold in the big agencies. By the time i left in 2018, that agency, db 360, was the primary dsp on my desk. It had the most spend and i try not to work with them at all. How about publishers . Does it have a similar effect on publishers . Stickiness for publishers is exclusive. Publishers care about two things, the prices they get and their volume. More and more platforms and more and more platforms. Theyre trying to get both of those. Theyre trying to get platforms with higher spms and trying to raise vol um yoo. Google has a huge funnel of lowcost highvolume bids coming in. Theyre coming in through Google Search platform which lets you buy display. Its long scale unsophisticated advertisers who dont know what theyre doing in display. Its a huge pipe of volume. If you get rid of googles exchange, you lose the volume. Publishers are stuck with googles sale side stack, even though they hate this, google mysteriouss youly wins a huge amount of auctions with low bids. When talking about it, publishers are trying to solve this problem of this water fog google demand winning tons of options. When you say mysteriously, tell me what you mean by that . Its supposed to be that the highest price wins, right . So, as incrementally, google has been claiming were making the option more and more fair, right . They used to have last look. They bid last. Thats an easy way to cheat. If you bid last, you can win a lot of auctions at low cost. So, get rid of last look. But what hasnt happened is the share of auctions google wins hasnt gone down and the cpm hasnt gone down. So, thats mysterious. Senator klobuchar. Very good, senator lee. I think we have another vote so ill just ask a few more questions here. I mentioned this earlier, but over the years the budgets of both federal antitrust agencies, ftc, and the department of justice have failed to keep pace with the growth of the economy despite an everincreasing workload. Theres numerous studies showing increased mergers, increased complexity, and then less staff than we had during Many Republican president s of the past. And so that is why and this is something thats been declining over the years. Thats why, as i mentioned senator grassley and i introduced one bill, the merger filing fee modernization act to ensure that companies that are engaging in megamergers pay more of the share of what are increasingly billion dollar mergers. As you know, we now have two companies over a trillion dollar that are trillion dollar companies. And also we could just simply budget more money because so much money comes in from these antitrust investigations. And it can basically pay for itself. Mr. Dinelli, given the complexity of digital markets, do you have a view on whether the ftc and antitrust division could use Additional Resources . Thank you, senator. I didnt make this clear in my Opening Statement, but i did work the department and have first hand knowledge of the incredible work load those people were facing even back in 2011 and 2012 when i was there. They work extremely hard, probably much harder than they should given the importance to our economy and to our business life. There is no doubt but that they could benefit from additional staff, additional expertise, and additional funds. I am not an expert in their current levels of funding, so my knowledge is second and third hand. But what i hear is that people remain continually overworked and that there are not enough resources to investigate fully the kinds of mergers that have gone through, nor to bring the kind of Enforcement Actions we see. These are difficult actions to investigate. They require lots of economist time, lots of lawyers time, lots of investigators time. We know this simply by the fact that its been reported that the department of justice has been investigating google for 16 months and there are public reports that the staff thinks they need even more time. These are complicated markets and they deserve everything they can. I worked for an ftc commissioner way too long ago, and yes, they do great work at these agencies. I think the funding question is a good one to ask if they dont have enough funds to do the research. I will tell you that both have been positive about adding more resources, yes. I think one thing that would truly help is getting a true delineation of authority. Right now we have two agencies doing the same job. One of the things we can do is move merger and Acquisition Authority exclusively into the federal trade commission and make enforcement exclusively a arm of the department of justice that will free up resources without increasing costs and make taxpayer dollars even more efficient. One idea one idea is to, as i said, change the Legal Standard so its easier to bring cases and get the resources to investigate. And i again, senator lee and i disagreed about this, i dont see this given all the priorities we have right now that weve discussed with privacy and Everything Else that this is all about a cross jurisdictional fight. This is about a major shift in our economy when the Tech Industry alone now is, what, 20 of the stock market and we havent upgraded our laws or figured out how were going to do anything when we have some bipartisan agreement that something has to change here. So, mr. Dinnielli, googles technical acquisitions is certainly one of the reasons that i think weve seen, as mr. Heimlich as explained this, dominance. More effective merger enforcement as we look back might have prevented that. Thats one of the reasons i introduced a different bill, but promotion act to restore the original purpose of the clayton act to spot competitive problems before they fully write. The bill would create a more different standard more favorable to allow the agencies to take action. The bill also includes provisions to shift the burden to merging parties under certain circumstances in major cases where they have to prove that the transaction, not that it doesnt say public interest, but simply that it doesnt hurt competition, that its not anticompetitive. As opposed to having the burden on the government. And would reforming the Legal Standards for assessing the competitive impact of mergers help to prevent market dominance, do you think . We also could look at lookbacks, at least when consent decrees are reached and the like, that were able to look back at whether or not they are truly working. Theres all kinds of things we could do, including in the case of facebook, whatsapp and instagram, looking back at those purchases and what that has meant. Thank you, senator. Many of the bills that you have sponsored would be enormously beneficial to the enforcement community. Im thinking in particular for example about the change in the merger standard from a requirement that the transaction be shown substantially to endanger competition to materially. I think this is important, especially in fastmoving markets, because its difficult to predict the future, which is often required to a high degree of certainty in merger cases. We just saw a significant merger case be denied by a Federal District court in new york, in the case of the merger of two Telephone Companies. One of the problems is its difficult to know whats going to happen next. A change in the standard would benefit merger enforcement. I also think that the conducting of hearings such as this airs the issues that we all should be thinking about and how the various players in these markets are acting. I also will say that politically weve been through a period in which we tended to give Technology Companies the benefit of the doubt. They were new. They were chic. They seemed to be evergrowing. They were exciting. I think we have a public consciousness now that its time to think about are they doing harm as well as benefits. The economic literature is just beginning to grow, and i hope that that will continue and that that will aid the enforcements going forward. Were going to have to get the media interested in covering the hearings. I think theyre interested in something that happened on cnbc this morning. I was just looking at twitter to see if anyone was looking at our meeting. Instead, we have this major issue in front of us and i dont think thats what theyre covering today. So, i hope that youre right and that we can get a more focus on this. I think doing investigations both congressionally and of to make a difference. But i really think people have started to have it. They see that there is too much consolidation and they understand theres not enough competition. They understand all these Small Businesses are being bought out. And its on us. I dont think that senators in the past like senator sherman said no one really gets this. Theyre mad about the economy, so were not really going to do anything. Its a republican senator. I dont think some of our predecessors said that in these agencies. I think its on us for people that care about entrepreneurship and competition, its on us to take this on. Thats what im hoping well be doing next year. If i could just add, i would comment that at one point railroads were new as well. Thats right. Now i know 90 of the freight traffic, i believe, is carried by four carriers, which is the exact number of railroads on the monopoly board. Mr. Szabo, did you want to respond . I got the sense you wanted to respond . Which comment . In response to my question just before i went to senator klobuchar. If not, thats fine. I have another question for you. Yeah, real quickly, the definition of market, the argument is money has been flowing away from television, radio and print media to online ads, then clearly those are interchangeable goods for the definition of market. And they are clearly interchangeable goods means that the definition of marketplace must include all advertising. We cant just narrow he define it to be google. If you define the market as google, its going to be a monopoly. Thats what you saw on the cma report in the uk. Mr. Szabo, i have heard complaints from news publishers on occasion that theyre struggling because they cant adequately monetize their content due to what they characterize as googles monopoly. Do you think its also possible that they might be struggling because the news industry is, itself, infected with widespread bias, and Many Americans simply arent inclined to spend their hardearned money or their time reading biased reporting . Is that a possible explanation . I think one of the Biggest Challenges that news media is facing today is the number of options available and the fact that the notion of a reporter could be somebody as simple as having a camera and a cell phone. And the conception of a news room being the alpha and omega of where we get our information i think has gone away. And thats an outgrowth of the democratization of speech. Now you can have Something Like a drudge report or you can have Something Like huff huington post. Those are News Agencies or information sources. So, thats the thing. Yes, maybe some of the old Legacy Industries need to change and update, and i hope they do. But at the same time, we seen the New York Times and the Washington Post do quite well recently. So, clearly they can make it through. And yes, its going to be harder for local News Agencies when i can go to moviephone. Com and not have to go to the newspaper. Im going to ask three members of the panel to describe to me briefly, if in fact google is operating its ad business in an anticompetitive manner, what would be the appropriate manner. Well start with mr. Sullivan, then mr. Dinelli and finish mr. Hime lich. If evidence were to show facebook uses monopoly power and causes consumer harm, i think the remedy would be the least damaging to the entire ecosystem if its an interoperability fix. I think the smallest fix we should shoot for would be the best one. A break up or threaten of break up would be detrimental not only to the ecosystem. It will increase prices. It will decrease efficiency. One of the things thats often misunderstood about Teddy Roosevelt, at the end of the day he didnt really want to break up the oil barrons because he recognized doing so would just create a thousand Small Oil Companies with decreased efficiencies. If remedy is sought, it should be the smallest remedy possible. I do cite to that Teddy Roosevelt quote in my testimony as well. Okay. So, you would say a nondivestment requiring absolutely. The smallest change possible because the unintended consequence ts and downstream impact to all consumers. Mr. Dinelli. Thank you, senator. I think one difficulty in designing remedies is often times the process of enforcing the law teaches us exactly what is wrong, what has gone wrong, and how the best fixing might be developed. So, my answer would be we need to start with the most vigorous enforcement of section two of the sherman act as we can. That enforcement action, in my view, must include both the Search Market and the digital ad market. Weve heard a variety of people testifying today about the connections between these two markets. I could explain them in detail if i had had the time, but i know were wrapping up. I will say that is the place to start. We should see what the evidence is that the department of justice has gathered. We should examine it. We should read the complaint. And then we should have further hearings. If during the course of that enforcement action there are opportunities to think about additional changes to the law, we should enact them. If there are opportunities to provide Additional Authority to regulators, we should provide them. But we must start with the enforcement action and the disclosure of all of the evidence thats been gathered over the past 16 months. Finally mr. Heimlich. Thank you. I agree with everything mr. Dinelli said but i would go further. I think this has gone on so long, unfortunately, that the remedy is going to have to be very significant. Some break up or forced interoperability between the search and ad tech market, yes. But we cant forget android and chrome. Its an enormous amount of data thats playing in this market and fits the same pattern of nonad Tech Products feeding googles power in the marketplace. But the ad tech is where the revenue comes from, right . Isnt it Something Like 85 , 90 of the revenue . Google makes most of its money selling ads and search on youtube and use that data dominate the market. Easiest solution is to separate those. The deeper ive researched im concerned theres significant data from android and chrome also being tied into the market such that even if you separated search and youtube from ad tech, they would replace what they had already done with data from android and chrome. Just a few things mr. Szabo. The oil industry was case was successfully resolved and standard oil was broken up under president taft. That case went on for a while, isnt that right . Yes, but when you look at what Teddy Roosevelt has been lionized as a trust bust e its important to look at what his intent was. Okay. I just think its important the record reflect it did break up standard oil and it went through many administrations. Thats my own political view. And we will eventually get to the place we have to go, if i have anything to do with it. I also want to point out simply because we want to have new standards in place that fit our economy doesnt mean that we are antibusiness, and it certainly doesnt even mean that you go into it saying everything should be broken up. I dont. Ive tried to be responsible by putting forward bills that i think could fit regardless of what i think of a particular company. And i think thats an important point to make. And the third thing is im glad theres some interest in beefing up resources on everyones part. And i hope that were going to be able to make sense of all this. I think for too long people have thrown up their hands and said these are Cool Companies so its okay. I dont think its okay anymore. And its not going to be okay as we see these growing monopolies and it is on us to make those changes. I want to put on the record before we go vote, mr. Chairman, a letter from Consumer Reports debated that is dated september 15th to the two of us on their views on the subcommittee and their concerns about what is happening with Online Advertising. Thatll be admitted into the record without objection. And the record for this hearing will remain open for one week. The committee stands adjourned. Thank you very much for your participation and your testimony today