Lawmakers Focus on AMP in Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages technology, known as AMP among web publishers, took a beating last month as an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas charged that the ad biz used AMP to hinder competition.

Terence Eden, a member of the AMP Advisory Committee, which was formed two years ago in response to criticism that the AMP project ignored publisher concerns, announced his resignation, citing the project’s failure to make the web better.

Texas AG’s complaint indicates Google has documented exactly how bad AMP is, and ties it to a deliberate play to prevent competition from header bidding. Header bidding is a way websites can auction ad space to multiple ad exchanges at once. It’s an alternative to the “waterfall” or “daisy-chain” approach where space gets auctioned to bidders sequentially. Header bidding is said to be more advantageous for publishers by allowing them to get better prices for their ad space. The Texas AG’s complaint against Google claims that Google abused its search market monopoly power to stop header bidding as a way to ensure ad transactions went through its own ad exchange.