The CEO of $50 billion adtech giant The Trade Desk is calling for Google to be broken up

The DOJ and state attorneys general are also calling for a Google breakup.

Green said Google may also choose, as a concession, to get out of the so-called sell-side of the business where it represents publishers other than its own properties. Instead, Green said, the tech giant could just focus on monetizing Google.com and YouTube. However, Green said unraveling its DoubleClick for Publishers ad server — software that allows publishers to manage their ad inventory — would be complicated.

“The second they bought DoubleClick, they began rewriting it and made it fully integrated, so it will take a bunch of work for them to do that,” Green said, referring to Google’s 2008 $3.1 billion purchase of the adtech company DoubleClick, which forms a key part of the DOJ’s case against the company.

Green, a frequent Google critic, said no matter the trial’s outcome, he is confident the future looks bright for the ad-funded internet.

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

“I do believe that Google’s behavior is going to change and the market will get fairer,” Green said. “I’ve always said The Trade Desk managed 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 ad agencies — has grown into an adtech juggernaut. Having debuted on the Nasdaq in 2016, the California-based adtech company now has a market capitalization of almost $50 billion.

Google and its lawyers have argued that the DOJ’s antitrust case focuses on a “narrow view” of the adtech market that is not based on reality and that advertisers and publishers have the choice to use hundreds of different companies that it competes with.

Google referred Business Insider to a blog post it published last week. In it, Google named-checked The Trade Desk as one of those alternative players in the ad market. Green said he found the comparison flattering when Sundar Pichai, in 2022, named TikTok and The Trade Desk as its competitors.

“I’ve joked 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 capitalization is only about 2% of Google’s on any given day, meaning an “ant” would be a better comparison.

Green spoke at the London conference on the same day Jed Dederick, The Trade Desk’s chief revenue officer, gave evidence in Google’s antitrust trial in Virginia.