Day 7: Is a Recipe Any Good Without Ingredients on Hand?

Yesterday, I left off with a cliffhanger. In this edition, we’ll close the loop on that witness, see what his boss and another senior Google engineer had to say, reflect on what the testimony reveals about whether the DOJ’s remedies satisfy its goals, highlight intriguing new thoughts about the impact of AI on remedies from DOJ’s last witness— and learn about the lingering questions on Judge Brinkema’s mind.

But first, time to resolve the cliffhanger. One of Google’s own witnesses, Glenn Berntson, an Engineering Director for AdX and DFP (together called GAM), admitted on Day 6 that Google could provide DFP’s data and decision logic to publishers. Berntson seemed open to giving publishers more information—calling it a “good idea”— and almost seemed on the brink of negotiating, with DOJ’s Matthew Huppert, the transition into open source of DFP’s decision logic. This would be a huge break-through! One of DOJ’s two main structural remedies accomplished!

In the cold morning light, though, the momentum evaporated. Huppert did ask, “Would Google be willing to allow its publisher customers to audit what you call its ‘Final Logic’?” but Berntson demurred. Judge Brinkema then asked him if he was saying that it was technically feasible, and he retreated another step. He said it isn’t the code being open source that is the problem; the problem is having the code and the data in separate places. Somewhere along the way, Brinkema asked whether giving a third party logic without data was like giving someone a recipe without ingredients. Berntson said that giving logic would provide transparency to publishers, which sounds more useful than just giving a recipe. He also acknowledged that publishers would have ingredients (data) from their own customers. DOJ then pressed from a different angle, asking whether DFP’s massive historical bid data give a competitive advantage over smaller ad servers. Berntson dodged, disagreeing with the characterization. Data is a somewhat tricky subject for Google, as illustrated by another witness discussed below.

There are two different arguments going on about technical feasibility: one revolving more around AdX, and the other around DFP. They overlap and mix together, but they were separately addressed on Tuesday, making them clearer than usual.

Before returning to Berntson’s testimony about DFP, let’s first consider what his boss (who testified after Berntson) said about the technical feasibility questions that relate most to AdX. Noam Wolf is Engineering Lead for GAM. I ...