Google is launching its defense in an antitrust lawsuit alleging it controls advertising technology

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Google launched its defense against accusations that it has an illegal monopoly on internet advertising technology Friday with a barrage of evidence that says the industry is more complex and more competitive than defined by the federal government.

“The industry has had a lot of water in the last 18 years,” said Scott Sheffer, vice president for global cooperation at Google, the company’s first witness in its antitrust case in federal court in Alexandria .

The Department of Justice and a coalition of states insist that Google created and maintained illegal control over technology that helps buy and sell online ads that consumers see.

Google says the government’s lawsuit focuses on a narrow type of online ads — specifically the rectangular ones that appear at the top and right of a web page. In its opening statement, Google’s lawyers said the Supreme Court had warned judges against acting in a fast-moving technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error. or unintended consequences.

Google says that defining the market ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others that offer advertisers ways to reach online consumers.

Attorneys for the Justice Department called witnesses to testify two weeks before they rested their case Friday afternoon, describing the ways in which independent ad exchanges run auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads placed in front of customers and how much they cost.

The department says the auctions are charged in subtle ways that help Google keep out potential competitors and in ways that prevent publishers from making as much money as they could from selling their ad space.

It also says that Google’s technology, when used in all aspects of the advertising business, allows Google to save 36 cents on the dollar of ad spend, billions of which happen every day.

Executives at media companies such as Gannett, which publishes USA Today, and News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, have said that Google dominates the technology used by advertisers to sell. advertising space as well as advertisers who want to buy it. Products are linked together so advertisers must use Google’s technology if they want to access its huge advertising space.

The government said in its appeal last year that Google should at least be forced to sell part of its business that deals with publishers, breaking its dominance.

In his testimony Friday, Sheffer explained how Google’s tools have evolved over the years and how it has audited advertisers and publishers to guard against issues such as malware and piracy.

The trial began on September 9, just a month after a District of Columbia judge declared Google’s core business, its ubiquitous search engine, an illegal monopoly. That case is still ongoing to determine what, if any, remedies the judge may offer.

The advertising technology at issue in the Virginia case does not generate the same kind of revenue for Google as its search engine does, but it is still believed to bring in tens of billions of dollars a year.

Overseas, authorities have also accused Google of anti-competitive behavior. But the company scored a victory this week when an EU court overturned a 1.49 billion euro ($1.66 billion) antitrust fine imposed five years ago that focuses on a different part of the company’s online marketing business.