Columbia University professor warns court against plan to divest Google of ad tech programs

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) — Google’s ad tech is part of a bespoke, custom-built system — the Michael Jordan of databases — and divestiture would not be a simple matter, a witness said during the trial over how to remedy the tech giant’s antitrust violations.

After studying the proposed divestiture of Google’s ad tech programs, Jason Nieh, professor of computer science and co-director of the Software Systems Laboratory at Columbia University, concluded that moving the company’s source code to another business would be an “undertaking of unprecedented complexity with a high degree of uncertainty and no guarantee of success.”

Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, a Bill Clinton appointee, ruled Google had committed antitrust violations in the operation of its ad tech arm. The current trial revolves around how the tech giant will pay for its violations. Justice Department attorneys are spearheading a proposal to sell off lucrative features of Google’s ad tech. They are targeting the AdX exchange, a digital marketplace for purchasing and selling online ads, along with the company’s ad server, DFP, DoubleClick for Publishers, also known as Google Ad Manager.

“I can’t say with confidence that it is likely that either divestiture would be concluded in five years,” Nieh said.

It could take considerably longer, and the result might not be comparable to the current system, he said, based on his research. Any business taking on the challenge would have to devote considerable resources to it. “You are going to stifle innovation,” he pointed out, as employees will be busy.

He offered similar opinions regarding proposed divestiture during a previous case against Google’s search engine business in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. His faculty biography page on Columbia’s websitenotes that he has won six Google Research Awards. He testified late in the afternoon Thursday and will undergo cross-examination Friday.

Called to the stand by Google’s legal team, Nieh directly contradicted the testimony of two Justice Department witnesses. Goranka Bjedov, a former Google employee, testified that the firm’s ad exchange and server could be moved to another employer within two years.

“She didn’t look at a single line of code,” Nieh said of Bjedov.

Another witness, Jon Weissman, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, testified that it would be possible to migrate Google code to another platform. Nieh characterized that analysis as incomplete.

Earlier in testimony Thursday, Heather Adkins, a security manager at Google, also testified that divestiture would be difficult. “We’ve implemented things in a pretty unique way,” she said.

Google is in the process of attempting to spin off Verily, its life science research organization, she noted. It has taken more than two years.

Migrating code requires study — going line by line before migrating it to a new environment. “It takes a long time to finely tune it,” she said, adding that the whole system would have to be tested. “You need security at every step of the design.”

Asked about proposals to open-source code, Adkins noted that the upside is that more people will look at it and find the flaws. The downside, she said, involves security: “It’s a target, to be candid.”

Even with artificial intelligence toiling away on code, humans are still needed to oversee things. She added that the performance of the ad tech programs involved would be different in the end.

The trial continues Friday.