20/ According to the complaint, Project Bell worked similarly, but with the opposite intention: it systematically reduced advertiser bids on publisher inventory where another exchange had first-look privileges.
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21/ DYNAMIC REVENUE SHARE: The tactics described above, as depicted by the complaint, applied to buy-side margins. The complaint alleges that Google introduced a program to achieve the same end with sell-side margins called Sell-Side Dynamic Revenue Share.
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22/ The complaint proposes that Google reduced its sell-side margin to allow the net bid (ie. money paid to the publisher) to exceed that of rival exchanges in cases where Google would have otherwise lost. The DoJ alleges that this was only possible through control of DFP & AdX.
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23/ PROJECT POIROT: The complaint alleges that Google instituted a scheme called Project Poirot to drive more of its DV360 DSP demand through AdX, versus other exchanges that participated in header bidding, by systematically reducing bids to rival exchanges.
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24/ According to the complaint, Project Poirot, in combination with dynamic allocation, allowed Google to reduce bids to first-price auctions on rival exchanges (likely accommodated with header bidding) through DV360 such that they served as price floors for AdX.
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25/ In short: DV360 reduced advertiser bids to rival first-price exchanges, and the outcome of the first-price auction was passed to DFP. DFP sent that information to AdX via dynamic allocation, which passed it back to DV360 as a floor price. DV360 then provided two bids to AdX.
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26/ UNIFIED PRICING RULES: According to the complaint, Google realized that rival exchanges won impressions via DV360 demand because DFP allowed publishers to set divergent exchange-level price floors for traffic. In other words: publishers demanded higher prices from AdX.
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27/ The complaint alleges that Google responded by transitioning AdX to a first-price auction -- aligned with the rest of the market -- while simultaneously removing this price floor configurability from DFP, which it called Unified Pricing Rules.
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28/ The complaint asserts that publishers were unhappy with this change and saw it as a reduction of granular control over the way in which they served impressions and balanced demand sources.
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29/ The entire DoJ complaint can be found here: justice.gov/opa/press-rele
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