Google Says the Open Web Is ‘in Rapid Decline’, But Insists It Means in an Advertising Sense ⇥ seroundtable.com

Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable:

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said in May that web publishing is not dying. Nick Fox, VP of Search at Google, said in May that the web is thriving. But in a court document filed by Google on late Friday, Google’s lawyers wrote, “The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline.”

This document can be found over here (PDF) and on the top of page five, it says:

The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline and Plaintiffs’ divestiture proposal would only accelerate that decline, harming publishers who currently rely on open-web display advertising revenue.

This is, perhaps, just an admission of what people already know or fear. It is a striking admission from Google, however, and appears to contradict the company’s public statements.

Dan Taylor, Google’s vice president of global ads, responded on X:

Barry – in the preceding sentence, it’s clear that Google’s referring to ‘open-web display advertising’ – not the open web as a whole. As you know, ad budgets follow where users spend time and marketers see results, increasingly in places like Connected TV, Retail Media & more.

Taylor’s argument appears to be that users and time are going to places other than the open web and so, too, is advertising spending. Is that still supposed to mean the open web is thriving?

Also, if you actually read the filing, you will quickly see that Google is clearly differentiates between “open web” — no hyphen, no qualifiers — and “open-web display”, with the latter explicitly referring to advertising. There is an entire section about the open web beginning on page 16, concluding with this paragraph:

The divestitures of AdX and DFP would risk accelerating the ongoing shift in spending away from open-web display inventory. Plaintiffs propose to require Google to divest its ad exchange and publisher ad server for open-web display advertising. But they acknowledge — as they must — that Google could continue operating an ad exchange and a publisher ad server for any other ad format. The outcome would be to incentivize Google to shift the resources it invests in serving open-web publishers to serving publishers who prioritize other formats, like app and CTV, as well as its non-open web properties such as YouTube. And divestiture will also eliminate the efficiencies of integration within Google’s ad tech stack, so that Google’s advertiser customers are likely to see a further decline in their return on investment from open-web display ads. Advertisers will vote with their feet and accelerate the existing trend of shifting spend to non-open web display ad formats. Automated AI-powered tools seeking greatest ROI will make that shift in spend even faster. In short, Plaintiffs’ remedies will harm publishers — particularly smaller publishers reliant on open-web display who have not diversified to other ad formats — by accelerating the decline of the open web.

In context, this sure looks to me like Google is arguing that forcing it to divest AdX and DoubleClick for Publishers will more negatively impact publishers without other advertising revenue streams, thereby worsening the open web. The “accelerating the decline” line is repeated here, though it is phrased ambiguously. This could be read in the way Schwartz has and the way many publishers are feeling — that the open web, as a whole, is in decline. Or it could be read the way Taylor insists Google has meant it, as accelerating the decline of open web advertising. If that is what Google meant, it would be better if it had phrased these references to advertising as clearly as it did in the rest of the document.