The Aussie who testified against Google for the US government
Whenever $17.5 billion global advertising giant Interpublic talks to its major clients – the likes of American Express, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and Spotify – about advertising on search engines, it presents them the same chart.
It reveals Google has 88.43 per cent market share in the US. Bing, owned by Microsoft, is second, with 6.21 per cent. Interpublic’s internal briefing document, titled “Market share for search engines in the U.S.A. … it isn’t even close”, surfaced in a Washington court in early October as part of the biggest competition lawsuit in two decades: the US Department of Justice’s case against tech titan Google.
“Why does IPG include this information in a deck to educate its clients on search advertising?” Lara Trager, a lawyer from the DoJ, asked one witness on October 3.
“The purpose of this is to indicate why we always buy Google Search ads,” the witness replied.
Former UM Worldwide global chief media officer Joshua Lowcock. Steven Herppich
That man was Joshua Lowcock, an Australian who was global chief media officer at Interpublic’s media agency, UM Worldwide. He has emerged, alongside Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg, as a key witness in the DoJ’s case against Google.
The DoJ and a group of US states are taking on Google’s search business, which last year generated $US162 billion ($252 billion) for the tech giant.
The feds have argued that Google “subverted competition in internet advertising technologies” through “serial acquisitions and anticompetitive auction manipulation”. In other words, the trial focuses on whether Google has illegally maintained its monopoly by spending billions of dollars to stifle competition and preserve its grip over
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