“The concern about how we comms even more spend shift into AdX will be tricky,” Sam Temes, a Google executive, wrote to Srinivisan in January 2019, several months before Google publicly announced the change. Comms is a shorthand for communication or public relations strategy.

Google ended up presenting the Unified Pricing Rules policy in a blog post about a different topic: the shift to first-price auctions, where an advertiser with the highest bid wins the auction. The new Unified Pricing Rules policy is buried several paragraphs into that post and described as a way to “maintain a fair and transparent auction.”

This strategy was intentional, according to an email presented by the DOJ during Srinivasan’s testimony. Srinivasan wrote that Unified Pricing Rules and ensuring Google’s products can compete without being disadvantaged by publishers was the “primary internal objective for the entire launch,” while a first-price auction was a “secondary objective.”

“The reason we’re bundling these 2 launches together, is that moving to a first price auction provides us additional justification to remove some [of] these controls,” Srinivasan wrote.

In cross-examination, Srinivisan noted that switching to a first-price auction made it less necessary for publishers to set different floors for different buyers, and Google did not remove all ways for publishers to set different floor controls for different buyers.

Google lawyers cited internal data from several months after Unified Pricing Rules launched that the top 500 publishers actually saw a 2.7% increase in revenue as a result of the change.