The judge responsible for deciding the fate of Google prefers not to

While the second phase of the Google Ad Tech trial was stopped, judge Leonie Brinkema still hoped that Google and the Ministry of Justice would make him the decision.

“My favorite sentence is” adjusting this affair “, she told lawyers for both sides shortly before postponing the courtroom after more than 10 days of trial in the remedies. Brinkema judged in April that Google illegally monopolized the publisher’s advertising servers and advertising exchanges, and illegally linked its products to make customers go to the options of competitors. It turns out that the decision could have been the easy part – after two more weeks, Brinkema is now responsible for deciding what should be done to restore competition in the markets that Google has smothered for a decade. This involves hours detailed by technical testimonies when experts disagreed on what is even possible to separate from Google’s own systems without creating new problems. In that spirit, it is not difficult to understand why Brinkema told lawyers that it was the kind of case “which should settle”.

There is not yet a sign that such a colony arrives, and at the end of the trial, Google and the Doj have sounded separate kilometers on what is both possible and necessary to restore competition. The government wants Brinkema for a sale of Google’s Adx exchange, open source logic that lives inside its DFP advertising server and decides which announcements are broadcast and leave the option for a sale of the DFP in case it does not work well enough. Google offers a series of constraints on its behavior and requirements for its advertising technology to work with new ways which, according to him, will satisfy the main reproaches of customers of the testing phase of the trial.

Without regulations, Brinkema will be left in the same unenviable position as Judge Amit Mehta was previously in the case of the Doj against the monopoly of Google’s research: decide how to reorganize the market in the future to take into account the past damages. Mehta finally underlined the judicial humility in her decision to remedy and refused to go as far as a break from the Google Chrome browser. Although Brinkema can still choose to take a different path, its comments at the end of the trial indicate the challenge that several other cases of waiting technological monopoly could be confronted even if the government wins its initial fights.

The decisions of Mehta and Brinkema calling Google An illegal monopoly were historic, marking the first decisions of technological monopoly in a case filed by the government in more than 20 years. They showed that the courts could include technical enterprises and anti -competitive mechanisms buried in lines of code or lots of data, against an antitrust law written more than a century ago.

But to decide if a company has violated the law is probably a more comfortable land for a judge than to rethink a broken market for the future – in particular the one that relies on at least a certain degree of technical work to change. Throughout the trial, Brinkema heard expert witnesses on both sides about the technical feasibility of breaking Google’s advertising systems. Often, they seemed diametrically opposed – government experts said that changes would be achievable and saw no reason for degraded functionality, while Google experts painted the task as difficult, without promise of a comparable product on the other side.

If it renounces structural changes, Brinkema could always appoint an instructor to ensure Google’s compliance with behavioral remedies. Even with that, however, she feared that the bad decision could condemn the result. “It’s part of the key to making the final remedy,” said Brinkema. “I would be very concerned about any instructor who could have an interest in the result.”