Grand prize of 5,000. The deadline to submit videos is january 20th, 2021. For competition rules, tips, and more information on how to get started, go to our website, studentcam. Org. Now, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing examining googles Online Advertising and its potential impact on Market Competition. Lawmakers heard first from a google representative, then a panel of technology and trade association officials. There was also a focus on googles Online Search engine, data privacy issues, and antitrust legislation. Welcome to todays hearing of the subcommittee on antitrust competition policy and consumer rights. The title we have chosen for today is stacking the tech, hasi googleke harmed competition in Online Advertising . I want to thank Ranking Member klobuchar and her staff for working closely with me and my o office as we prepared for today. And also want to thank our chairman, the chairman of the full Senate Judiciary committee, senator graham, for his support of this hearing. After i and then senator klobuchar give our opening remarks, well hear from two panelists of witnesses with sevenminute rounds of questions from the subcommittee. We have Something Interesting to deal with in the senate, and that every time they call votesh when they calley votes during ay subcommittee hearing or any hearing, for that matter, were at their mercy. A we have both cast our votes on o the first of aur series of thre or four. At some point, were either going to have to pause or tag t team as we allow other members sit in for us. Just dont be alarmed if that happens. The focus of todays hearing is googles Online Advertising business. Whether its a monopolist and n whether it might have engaged i any conduct that harms condu competition and harms consumersi but before we goon into that, i want to say just a few things about antitrust policy more broadly. I have been a member of this subcommittee ever since 2011 when i first arrived in the e e senate. And i have chaired the subcommittee for almost six years. Overhe that time, as the publi debates surrounding antitrust ug policy and enforcement has grown and in some cases evolved, so, too, has the gulf between the e opposing sides. Oppos one extreme fear are those who e would rather we have no uld antitrust laws at all. Antitru and the alternative, they advocate for an enforcement adva policy thatste overly deferentl to speculative efficiencies and quick to dismiss actual evidence of competitive harm whenever it mightwh conflict with unproven economic theories. This extreme end of the continuum sort of fetishizes freedom to the exclusion of the laws that maintain that very in freedom. They forget that very markets l governments do not keep not themselves free and that liberty is only secure when power is diffused. At the other extreme, however, is a line of arguments that has for years now been pushing an agenda sort of to sort of n transform the antitrust laws in this country from a tool based o in Economic Science to protect and promote competitive markets into a sort of panacea for all of their perceived social ills. Built on the economically myopie premise that big is bad and thats the beginning and end of the question, some in this end of the spectrum would use antitrust to address alleged labor, income, and racial go disparities. These may be laudable goals, but theyre not problems that antitrust law is meant to solve. Nor are their problems that antitrust law is even capable ob solving, at least without ust la creating a whole bunch of other problems, even within those a areas themselves. Attempts to repurpose antitrust law into a social justice pose program would have scores of unintended consequences that would cripple our economy for d generations. And of course, there is the hypocrisy in believing that big is bad applies only to corporations and not to government bureaucracy, the very type of government bureaucracy , that they would expand in order to dismantle and regulate them. D you may be wondering where i see myself in those two extremes, whose side am i on . Am i on the side of the American People . Yes, am i on the side of the law . Yes. I believe vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws is essential to maintaining the free markets that have made this the most prosperous nation on earth. And i believe that our current laws are for the most part sufficient to meet the n challenges of the day. I said a moment ago that libert. Is only secure when power is diffused. This is a bedrock principle of our constitutional republic. The concept of federalism, perhaps the greatest repub contribution of the founding generation, and of our foundingc document, is what makes american unique among all other nations. E this principle applies equally to economic power as it does to political power. In a way, antitrust laws might properly be described as federalism for the economy. That brings us to today. Were here to discuss what may s be the seminole antitrust case of the 21st century. One whose precedent will definen the termse of competition and innovation in our dynamic economy for years, in fact for o decadesmy to come. Unlike some of my colleagues iny the house, im not interested in staging a political spectacle to attack, to condescend, and to talk over witnesses. Naive though it may be in 2020, my hope is that by looking at t this specific question, we can have a serious and frank th conversation about the state ofe competition in digital markets. T Online Advertising is an incredibly complex business. And one that touches every Single Person on the internet. The technologies involved in inr connectingne advertisers and publishers have evolved rapidly in the last decade, and the lat expansion of Online Advertising has facilitated an explosion ofd online content by allowing even the smallest website owners to monetize the content they produce. Small andnd local businesses have alsoo benefitted from being abl to quickly and easily promote their businesses without any of the same Capital Investments that would have beene sam requi and indispensable for that n reu effort justir a few decades ago. So at the same time, this growth and this expansion has been exn largely consolidated onto a single platform, googles onlini ad business. As that business has grown, so, too, have complaints that that google, which both operates the ad selling and ad buying g and platforms, and sells its own inventory through those platforms. As conflukicts of interests and rigged technology and ad on auctions to favor its own ts interest and protect its own market share. Whether this is true or not tru matters because so many businesses depend upon Digital Advertising to market their productsad or to monetize the r content that they produce. Web users in turn benefit from f free online content and being ea connected to relevant businesses in a way that helps them to make optimal business decisions. L bui simply put, markets function better when businesses thrive and consumers are informed. Ideally, Online Advertising helps accomplish this. Ine ad if, however, Online Advertising has been monopolized and constrained by opaque pricing and exclusionary conditions, everyone loses to that degree. I would also add that google and other Big Tech Companies have been accused of a number of badf acts unrelated to antitrust or to competition. I myself have repeatedly expressed concerns about anticonservative bias by these firms and ill continue tofirmss pursue those concerns, but whilb i believe that issues like anticonservative bias certainly have implications for antitrust such as perhaps evidencing market power, todays hearing is not fundamentally about those concerns. This hearing is about an. Analytically distinct issue, about antitrust allegations in Online Advertising that are a legitimate subject of inquiry in their own right, and to be clear, just as i reject demands to use antitrust for social justice, i also emphatically reject using antitrust to solve other nonantitrust concerns. Todays discussions will, i hope, help everyone to better understand the Online Advertising market and how competition works or should work and how it might not be migh operating as well as it could i that space. I look forward to hearing from o our experienced and highly qualified witnesses. Thank you, and ill now turn tod Ranking Member klobuchar for her opening remarks. Well, thank you so much, mr. Chairman. And thank you to our witnesses, to mr. Harrison appearing virtually, and i want to start by making something absolutely clear. We are not having this hearing n because google is successful. Ar google is successful. Sful i just. Used it on my way here. W or because google is big. Thats not why, from my perspective, were having this t hearing. We are having it because even Successful Companies, even suc popular cecompanies, and even Innovative Companies are subject to the laws of this country. Including our antitrust laws. We are all successful when we el make sure that our economy is t strong and our economy is our working better. But the law cant be blinded by googles success or its past ss innovations if the company in o its zealif to achieve greater se successal crosses a line into anticompetitive behavior. Ticom its our job to regulate it. Its that simple. It so were going to touch on ere issues i hope today of competition, technological innovation, the use of personalv data, these are some of the a, h defining issues as the chair has said, defining issues of our her time. And i personally think, as we go into the months to come, this os wont just be about google. His this isnt even just about the t Tech Industry as much as i ogle. Believe we need to change our laws and look at monopolies ando changing the burdens and making it so that our laws are sophisticated as the companies h that nowat occupy our economy. I think we need to do all that, and i thinkth it should be a hud priority going into the year. Gog but right now, as the chairman h mentioned, we are focused on thism issue today. Ue our society has never been more dependent on this technology ent than we are now in the midst ofn this global pandemic, as i s gll noted, not just google. The pandemic has forced a buncht of Small Businesses to close their doors and the five largest Tech Companies continue to thrive to the point where they briefly accounted for nearly 25y of the value of the entire s p 500 staux index just a few weekk ago. St a again, i dont quarrel with their success. Few we but we have to start looking at do our laws really match that situation . And even if the original intenth when these companies started as startups was to be innovative, which they havevest been, at wh point do you cross the line so you squelch innovation and competition from other companies . We start with this, the ownership and use of data. The powerful companies that provide us with these com technologies arepa also collect personal information. Wees are know that. Th they know who our friends are. They know the books we read, where we live, whether we colleg graduated from e,college, incom levels, race, how many steps we took yesterday. The chairman and i share an interest in this. How long we have stayed where we are. Machine learning analyzes trove of personal data, allowing our firms to discern even more Sensitive Information about us. E our medical conditions, us, political, religious views, and even preferences that we dont n even know we have. And why would companies do all of this . D why well, put simply, to target us t with digital advertisement. Digia theres really no other reason. A it is a capitalist society. Thats what they do. Now, google makes more money doing that than any company in the world. More mo hands down. A by leveraging its unmatched access to consumer data gained through its existing dominance r in online andough mobile searchn mobile operating systems, system android, email, gmail, youtube, browsers, chrome, mobile mapping aps, and Ad Technology. This Ad Technology ecosystem known as the ad tac stack consists of advertisers on one side and publishers on the ts of other. So lets look at ad theseve two sides. On theside and advertising sidee controls access to the huge the number of advertisers that placf ads on Google Search, which has nearly 90 of the Search Market. And has unparalleled access toditeto date a. On the publisher side, google has access to ad data to inform its bidding strategies and then it also effectively controls thf process. The ad auction process that gets an advertisers ad to be put on a publishers site. Google dominates all of the markets for services on both r sides of the ad tech tack, the publisher side, and the other t side, and i hope that will be ar lot of our focus today. Toda research has suggested google may bested taking between 30 a 70 of advertising dollar spent by advertisers using its services depriving publishers og that revenue. That r who are the publishers . Theyre content publishers. Pub they depend on revenue, so many of our content producers, our u. News producers do, to get by, o and to me, given that my dad was a journalist, to me, this is on of the key elements here, the k because if you have unfairness e in how that ad ecosystem is is going, youre depriving these news organizations at a time when the First Amendment is already under assault of the revenue they need to keep going so whether its happening, and w we dont know all the details at the department of justice right now, this could be the beginning of aght now, reckoning for our t laws, to tart looking at how were going to grapple with the new kinds of markets that we see across our country. It would help answer the question of whether our federalp antitrust laws are able to our restrain the business conduct oe even the largest, most Successful Companies in the duct world. When you think of the breakup o. At t, that was our last big bra thing that happened in the big antitrust area, really big thing. What did that lead to . Lower prices, more competition. It reallylower worked. But were not able to do this o. Right now. E no and my hope is that were getting the start in the Justic Department that things are going on at the ftc, but to really do that, theyre going to need ly resources to take on the legions of lawyers at the companies, ans so thats my first goal. What can we do for enforcement . My second, what do we have to docement to make the laws work better . To look at some of the deals that have already been made. The third is what are the ve ale remedies . Do they made make a difference . Do they make a difference in e changing the behavior and allowing competition . I literally dont have personal grudges against these Companies Like sometimes the president has expressed about various companies. I dont. Vari i just want our capitalist system to work. I want it to work. To wor and to have it work, you simply cant have one company dominating areas of an industrya our Founding Fathers started this country in part because they were rebelling against heye monopoly power. We need to keep that spirit of entrepreneurship strong in this country. And this is a good way to start. Thank you, mr. Chairman. And i will be i may not be here right at the time because of the votes for my questions, but i will be here for questions. Thank you. Heree youll bet. An ink yo spirit either way. Thank you very much, senator ouy klobuchar. Sena well have two panels today. O pe our first panel will consist ofc mr. Harrison. Hes joining us virtually. ll if youll stand please to be sworn. Mr. Harrison, do you affirm thet testimony youre about to give before the committee will be th truth, the whole truth, and rut, nothing but the truth . Thing i do. Thank you. Ill now briefly introduce our witness for our firstt panel. It don harrison is googles president of global partnershipl andobal Corporate Development. As head of global partnerships overseas strategic partnershipss worldwide and is responsible for product and ecosystem enablement across googles product and business groups. Don manages the corporate oups. Development team that handles googles global mergers, acquisitions, and investments and has worked on googles hoo largest transactions. He also managed googles internal incubator, area 120, an a. I. Focused gradient fund. Prior to joining google, don was a lawyer where in 2003, he was first introduced to google and helped take the Company Public he started his career at the Toronto Law Firm otdavies ward, fil philips and feinberg. After earning aegree degree in Political Science in philosophy and law degree from the university of toronto. Thank you very much, mr. Harrison, for joining us today, and we look forward to your testimony. Well now hear your opening remarks. Chairman lee, Ranking Member klobuchar, and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. Committe my name is don harrison, at me s google i lead a partnerships and Corporate Development team wherp we support the growth of our products through partnerships, working with a range of businesses to helplp rtne themrs use our products to grow and succeed. I also receive area 120, our inhouse incubator that helps build businesses. My job at its core is to help other businesses grow. Usinesse as our partners businesses grow, ours does as well. The same is true of goo