Unredacted Antitrust Complaint Unsealed: Google Internal Documents Show AMP Pages Brought 40% Less Revenue to Publishers
In December 2020, we reported on a new antitrust lawsuit against Google that claimed AMP was created for the purpose of pushing publishers away from “header bidding.” This is an advertising mechanism that allows sites to route their ad inventory through several ad exchanges and sell the space to the highest bidder. At that time it was clear that these were troubling allegations regarding AMP’s performance and how Google may be using it to impede header bidding, but many key parts of the complaint were redacted. The full text of the newly unredacted complaint, which was unsealed by a federal judge last week, references research from internal Google documents. It states that internal Google communications identified header bidding as an “existential threat.” The complaint alleges that Google throttled non-AMP ads in order to give AMP a “nice comparative boost:” After crippling AMP’s compatibility with header bidding, Google went to market falsely telling publishers that adopting AMP would enhance page load times. But Google employees knew that AMP only improves the “median of performance” and AMP pages can actually load slower than other publisher speed optimization techniques. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for a Google-cached AMP version…
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