By Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge
As the second week of the US v. Google antitrust trial gets underway, the Department of Justice is focusing on the real moneymaker behind Google Search: ads. It alleges that Google’s dominance lets it raise prices for advertisers with few repercussions — a claim backed up by Google ads executive Jerry Dischler on the stand.
Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen has the details of Dischler’s testimony, where he describes statements he made under oath in 2020. Dischler says Google tweaks its auction process in ways that may have raised prices in the past by 5 percent for the typical advertiser and could potentially have raised them by 10 percent for some queries. The parties buying the ads would have been unaware of these “tunings” of prices; “we tend…