Trade Desk CEO calls for Google breakup amid antitrust lawsuit

Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, speaking Wednesday at ExchangeWire’s ATS conference in London, said Google built its lead in the adtech market by owning the tools publishers use to sell their ad space, the software advertisers use to buy ads, and the exchange that connects buyers and sellers.

“They’ve been the prosecutor, the defender, and the judge and jury,” of the online advertising ecosystem, Green said of Google. “The remedy is to say you have to give up at least one of those jobs: You can’t be all three.”

Green continued the analogy, saying that the profession that makes the least money is the judge and jury. In Google’s case, that would be AdX, the advertising exchange. Green predicted that Google would likely agree to spin off this part of its business if the judge ruled that the company did indeed have an illegal monopoly.

The Justice Department and state attorneys general are also calling for a breakup of Google.

Green said Google could also choose, as a concession, to get out of the so-called sell side of the business, where it represents publishers that aren’t its own properties. Instead, Green said, the tech giant could simply focus on monetizing Google.com and YouTube. However, Green said that untangling its DoubleClick for Publishers ad server — software that helps publishers manage their ad inventory — would be complicated.

“As soon as they bought DoubleClick, they started rewriting it and fully integrating it. So it’s going to take a lot of work to get that done,” Green said, referring to Google’s 2008 acquisition of ad tech company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, which is a key part of the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the company.

Green, a frequent critic of Google, said he is confident the future is bright for the ad-funded Internet regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit.

“Whether it’s because Google is afraid of having to go through this again — the CMA is watching, there are regulators around the world watching this, and they’re not done yet,” Green said, referring to the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority. Last week, the CMA said its investigation into Google’s adtech practices had preliminary concluded that the company had abused its dominant position in operating its publisher ad server and ad buying tools. Google said it disagreed with the CMA’s findings.

“I believe Google’s behavior is going to change and the market is going to become more fair,” Green said. “I’ve always said The Trade Desk was able to win in an unfair market — imagine what we could do in a fair market.”

Since its founding in 2009, The Trade Desk — which operates a demand-side platform for advertisers and agencies — has grown into an adtech giant. The California-based adtech company debuted on the Nasdaq in 2016 and now has a market cap of nearly $50 billion.

Google and its lawyers have argued that the Justice Department’s antitrust case focuses on a “narrow view” of the ad tech market that is not based on reality and that advertisers and publishers are given the choice of hiring hundreds of different companies to compete with.

Google pointed Business Insider to a blog post it published last week in which Google named The Trade Desk as one of those alternative players in the advertising market. Green said he found the comparison flattering when Sundar Pichai named TikTok and The Trade Desk as competitors in 2022.

“I’ve said before that even in David and Goliath, David was at least 30% or 40% the size of Goliath,” Green said. He added that The Trade Desk’s market cap on any given day is just 2% that of Google, meaning an “ant” would be a better comparison.

Green spoke at the conference in London on the same day that Jed Dederick, Chief Revenue Officer of The Trade Desk, testified in Google’s Virginia antitrust case.