Everyone is scared? Kevin Lee, Founder of Didit has submitted over $1 billion in Ad Spend for recovery in the “Mass Arbitration For Ad Spend Recovery” with law firm Keller Postman, from clients, former clients and friends. Yet nearly none of the CMOs and brands are willing to publicly discuss it. More concerning is that according to Kevin Lee, many of the larger ad agencies Kevin has spoken to refuse to mention the mass arbitration to clients because they a) have Google as a client within the holding company b) are afraid of Google retaliating against them if they weigh in c) don’t understand the magnitude of the monopoly profits found during the US trials because Google got the evidence sealed.
CMOs and Agencies will privately acknowledge that Google is a monopoly and thousands of brands and agencies have joined the “Mass Arbitration For Ad Spend Recovery” with law firms, in particular Keller Postman submitting claims on their behalf based largely on the evidence from the two separate US anti-trust cases that Google lost. Then why are few CMOs willing to go on record that they have submitted billions in ad spend for recovery and why are many agencies other than Didit loathe to go on record that monopoly profits should be repaid to advertisers? Kevin Lee were able to dig and find previous on-record statements, but mostly from publisher and ad-tech executives. Kevin stated: If the evidence clearly shows monopoly profits in search and display, the only fair thing is for Google to return that unfair monopoly profit to advertisers.” ” If it takes a mass arbitration to result in a fair outcome, I”m all for it.” Kevin also owns the eMarketing Association and took a rare sponsored post from Keller Postman to get the word out.
Past CMO and CEO gripes: Executive criticism of Google across publishers, platforms, ad-tech, and operating businesses
We’ve consolidated the executives and senior marketers grouping them by company type. We use the title each person held when the statement was made. That matters because several people in this list have since changed roles: Shar Dubey is no longer Match Group’s CEO, Patrick Spence stepped down from Sonos, Expedia’s CEO is now Ariane Gorin rather than Peter Kern, and Tripadvisor’s current President & CEO is Matt Goldberg rather than Steve Kaufer. Those changes do not make the underlying statements any less useful as contemporaneous evidence of how sophisticated counterparties described Google’s conduct at the time.
Publishers and media companies
Among publishers, the criticism is unusually direct and explicitly competition-focused. Gannett CEO Michael Reed said Google had “monopolized market trading” to its own advantage and to the detriment of publishers, readers, and the broader news ecosystem. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson went even further over a longer period, saying Google was willing to exploit its dominant market position to stifle competition and arguing that Google’s search, aggregation, and audience practices undermined the economics of professional content creation. In a later corporate statement, News Corp also said the evidence suggested publishers had been routinely “ripped off.”
Platforms, browsers, search, app distribution, and adjacent tech businesses
The platform and browser set is where the public record most clearly turns into an argument about gatekeeping power. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that the idea users truly have search choice is “complete bogus” because defaults drive behavior. DuckDuckGo argued that Google’s exclusive defaults and scale advantages were the product of illegal monopoly maintenance and that remedies should curb those advantages. Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers took a more qualified line, but still framed Google as one of the dominant players around which browser competition has to be rebuilt, warning that any remedy should strengthen independent alternatives rather than weaken them.
Yelp and Match Group gave the clearest examples of companies saying Google used control over a gateway market to dominate adjacent ones. Jeremy Stoppelman wrote that Google had illegally abused its monopoly in general search to dominate local search and local search advertising. Match Group, in suing over Play billing, said Google had monopolized the Play Store, was abusing that power, and had turned a former partner into a hostage.
Sonos and Basecamp described the same pattern from the standpoint of smaller operating businesses forced to live inside Google-controlled ecosystems. Patrick Spence said dominant platforms use their scope and dominance to unfairly disadvantage competitors and squelch potential competition. David Heinemeier Hansson argued that Google’s search monopoly should be broken up and portrayed Google’s sale of trademark-keyword ads as a way of extracting money from businesses that could not realistically opt out of Google’s search market power.
Ad-tech and the open-web infrastructure layer
The ad-tech complaints are the most technical and, in many ways, the most severe. The Trade Desk’s Jeff Green said Google should exit the open web and focus on YouTube because its dominance had harmed competition, especially for publishers and supply-side platforms. OpenX CEO John Gentry said Google “rigged digital advertising auctions” by structuring auctions so it could see bids and then change its own bid after the fact. Magnite CEO Michael Barrett said Google undermined Magnite’s ability to compete by favoring its own business over the health of the open web. PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel said Google had acted as a monopolist and rigged a market that should have rewarded innovation and fair competition.
Brand and business operators: where the criticism becomes economic rather than legal
On the brand side, the tone changes. These executives often do not speak in antitrust doctrine. Instead, they describe the commercial consequences of dealing with Google: brand-safety failures, traffic diversion, AI answers that keep users on Google, cookie-policy reversals, and a rising toll to acquire customers through search and performance channels.
The strongest pure marketing-side statement in this set came from Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard, then Chief Brand Officer. He said too much industry effort was being spent on “fixing problems” on platforms that were not originally built for advertising, and he added that brands had been “tolerant for too long” of the digital media world’s failures on quality, transparency, privacy, and control. Around that same worldview, Mavely’s Evan Wray called rising Facebook/Google acquisition costs a “systemic issue” for DTC brands, ButcherBox founder Mike Salguero said customer-acquisition costs were climbing across channels including YouTube, and Candid CEO Nick Greenfield said rising online ad costs were making the classic DTC model increasingly impractical.
A second cluster of DTC executives attacked the duopoly economics more than Google alone. Zak Normandin of Iris Nova / Dirty Lemon said customer-acquisition economics on Facebook had become unsustainable and that long-term acquisition needed to move outside digital; that is more Facebook-specific than Google-specific, but it belongs in the same broader backlash against dependence on the Google/Facebook machine. In beauty and wellness, Ryan Babenzien of Jolie said “paid marketing just isn’t working,” Sarah Moret of Curie said the brand had to move beyond its digital roots and Facebook-led growth, and Flaus founder Sam Coxe said Google’s cookie reversal was not surprising given Google’s track record of reversing course on policies like these.
Apparel and workwear brands made similar points in more operational language. Mack Weldon’s Brian Berger said the company had once spent nearly 80% of its marketing budget on Facebook and Google and then had to rebuild its economics after the most efficient parts of that mix stopped working as expected. Brunt founder Eric Girouard said the company consciously reduced its reliance on Facebook and Google ads early on. True Classic’s Ben Yahalom said the brand had been built largely on Facebook, Instagram, and Google before shifting toward a more omnichannel approach. These are not formal monopoly accusations, but they are still clear evidence that operators experienced Google as part of a costly, increasingly unstable acquisition system.
Travel: the deepest bench of on-record criticism from major brands
Travel is the category where well-known operating businesses most openly attacked Google by name. Tripadvisor’s Steve Kaufer said Google was using its “unfair advantage as gatekeeper to most of the internet” to drive traffic into Google’s own funnel at everyone else’s expense. Expedia’s Peter Kern said Google Hotels was “screwed up” and told Google that if it wanted Expedia to keep spending heavily there, the marketplace had to be made fair. Barry Diller, chair of IAC and Expedia, described Google’s search-ad behavior as punitive, said he was “on the edge of revolt,” and elsewhere argued that Google’s monopoly share let it extend its business in every direction it could.
Kayak and Trivago updated that travel critique for the AI-search era. Steve Hafner said Google’s changing mix of free and paid links, together with AI Overviews, forced Kayak to replace free traffic with paid Google traffic, pushing acquisition costs higher. Trivago said its performance-marketing channels were being hit primarily by changes in Google’s advertising formats, which created volatility and traffic losses. In travel, the core complaint is consistent over time: Google acts as the discovery gateway, then changes the rules in ways that make rivals pay more to reach users who previously arrived for free.
Financial services and education
Financial-information and education companies voiced some of the sharpest criticism of Google’s newer AI products. WalletHub CEO Odysseas Papadimitriou said Google had gone from organizing the world’s information to “stealing it,” arguing that the old bargain of crawl-for-traffic had broken down. NerdWallet CEO Tim Chen said organic search remained challenged because Google’s AI Overviews were causing more users to get answers without clicking through to websites. Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz said Google had “unjustly retained traffic” that historically went to Chegg, harming acquisitions, revenue, and employees.
What the record shows overall
Across publishers, platforms, ad-tech firms, and operating businesses, the criticisms cluster into four recurring themes. First, executives complain about default power and gateway control: Google controls the surface where users begin. Second, they complain about self-preferencing or structurally biased market design: local search, app distribution, or ad auctions that appear tilted toward Google’s own properties. Third, they complain about economic toll-taking: brands and travel companies increasingly feel forced to buy back traffic or visibility they once received more organically. Fourth, in the AI era, they complain that Google is keeping the answer on Google, reducing the clickthrough value that historically justified letting Google crawl and monetize the open web.
The sharpest monopoly language still comes from publishers, search rivals, and ad-tech infrastructure companies. By contrast, brand marketers and operating businesses more often speak in the language of acquisition cost, traffic loss, fairness, and dependence. But taken together, the record points in the same direction: a wide range of U.S. executives, from chief brand officers to founders, chairs, CEOs, and CTOs, have publicly described Google not as a neutral intermediary, but as a gatekeeper whose power can distort markets, raise costs, and redirect value back to itself. And even when some of those speakers are no longer in the same roles, their statements remain valid as historically grounded evidence of how the market experienced Google at the time.