Google dominates online ads, says antitrust trial witness, but publishers are feeling ‘stuck’

Google’s tool that lets publishers sell ad space on their websites is ubiquitous, but that’s largely a testament to how hard it is for customers to get out of it, one former publishing executive testified in federal court on Tuesday.

“I felt like they were holding us hostage,” said Stephanie Layser, a former programmatic advertising executive at News Corp (which owns brands like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post) who now works at AWS. Layser was testifying as a government witness in the Justice Department’s second antitrust case against Google, which is accusing the company of monopolizing the markets for ad tech tools and illegally tying together two of its products.

Layser was one of three witnesses the court heard from on…

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