Who wins and loses from the remedies to Google’s ad tech monopoly

Google: It still owns its ad exchange (AdX) and its ad server (DfP). It does not have to sell the former nor does it have to open-source the auction logic contained in the latter. And on nearly every other contested detail on how the remaining rules work, including timelines, monitor reporting, response windows and term length, the judge went with Google’s version over the Department of Justice. Most of what the remedies actually regulate, in the end, is how Google runs the auctions inside those two products. That matters but it’s not the full picture.

Adform’s CTO Jochen Schlosser summed it up: “Regulating auction access while leaving that buy-side integration intact doesn’t open the market, it just turns Google into a supervised public utility and sets up a six-year game of algorithmic hide-and-seek.”

Rival exchanges (cautiously): Index Exchange, PubMatic, OpenX and others get what they asked for: real-time bid access to AdX through Prebid — the open-source tool most publishers already run their auctions through. Right now, if a publisher wants money from advertisers buying from the AdX exchange they have to run a separate integration — one Google largely controls on its own terms. Once AdX has to submit its bids through Prebid like everyone else, publishers can run it in the exact same neutral auction they already use for every other exchange. AdX stops being a walled-off system publishers work around and becomes just one more exchange competing for the same inventory as everyone else. The expectation is that the increased competition will result in falling AdX win rates and rising publisher revenue since Google can no longer set pricing on that inventory without a real fight from rivals. 

A spokesperson for OpenX emailed the statement: “The opinion reiterates the harm Google caused in the ad server and ad exchange markets, and we are encouraged by the behavioral remedies the Court ordered to address those harms. OpenX will continue to pursue our civil case against Google to recover damages for the harm Google’s anticompetitive conduct caused to our business and to support fair competition in these markets moving forward.”

Prebid: It becomes the necessary connection tissue between AdX, DfP and the rest of the market. AdX will now have to expose real-time bids through a Prebid API rather than keeping that demand walled off, and DfP gets its own required server-to-serve connections to Prebid too. That’s a genuine win but it does stop short of the far bigger role the DOJ tried to hand it. Had it succeeded with the structural remedy proposal then Prebid, or an organization like it, would have run the actual mechanism that decides who wins auctions, not just the pipe bids flow through. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema rejected that plan entirely as a “de facto divestiture” so the administrator role never materialized. Instead, Prebid ends up as the load-bearing infrastructure for reaching Google’s demand but Google still owns and controls the auction logic behind it.

“However, if the following remedies are put in place and enforced (I haven’t read the 106 page document yet, so there may be some inaccuracies), it will make the ad market a much better place to for both publishers and advertisers,” said the ad tech lead at a European publisher on condition of anonymity since they’re not permitted to talk to the press.

Large, resourced publishers: Google now has to hand publishers their own historical and configuration data from DfP, along with data on every winning and losing bid across every AdX auction. It also has to build an API so that data can be exported straight to rival publisher ad servers and publish the documentation and technical support those rivals need to actually make sense of it once it lands. That’s great for big publishers, less so for the smaller ones without the technical chops to make sense of it all. But for those who can act on it, the benefit comes laced with one major caveat: it only covers open web display. The DOJ wanted video and in-app included but lost that fight. So even the publishers who can act on this are working with part of the picture.

Losers

The DOJ (in practice, not posterity): The DOJ lost nearly every fight over how strict and how fast these remedies would be — the term length, the monitor’s teeth, the response windows and DV360. But it is worth being fair to what it actually accomplished. This is the second major antitrust case the DOJ has won against Google in under two years, and the first specifically over ad tech. Moreover, it forced behavioral change onto a business that had operated on its own terms for over a decade. The DOJ also set a template, tying AdWords into the remedy, achieving Prebid interoperability and establishing that data sharing is a legitimate antitrust tool that other regulators, including across the European Union, can build on even if this particular judge stopped short of the breakup they wanted. Losing the fight over mechanics doesn’t erase the fact that Google is now operating under a second court order it wasn’t before. 

The market Google’s remedies don’t reach: CTV, in-app and retail media publishers get nothing at all given the whole judgement stops at open web display. Smaller publishers fare a little better on paper but between the technical lift needed to act on the new data right and a remedy that only covers part of their inventory anyway, they’re positioned to feel the benefit later, and less, than the bigger players already equipped to move on it. 

“The real test is whether those changes translate into more choice and innovation for publishers and advertisers,” said Scott Schiller, adjunct professor at NYU Stern and the principal at boutique consulting firm S350 Media Advisors.”The bigger question is whether a remedy focused on open-web display is solving yesterday’s market while advertising is rapidly moving toward CTV, retail media and AI.”

Too soon to call

The Trade Desk: A witness from the company testified at the trial so it had a real stake in how this shook out. It buys space on publisher sites on behalf of advertisers, which puts it in direct competition with Google’s own buying tools. A more competitive AdX helps it out here in theory. Once real-time bid flow through Prebid that means more transparent inventory for any buyer, The Trade Desk included. AdWords also can’t quietly facor Google’s own exchange or ad server anymore, smoothing over the edge Google had over rivals like The Trade Desk. But only up to a point. The remedies don’t touch DV360, the tool The Trade Desk actually competes with for ad budgets. Put another way, the ad tech vendor gets a marginally fairer playing field on the sell side, where real fight was never happening anyway, while the buy-side rival it did compete with keeps whatever advantages it already had.

European regulators: Brussels has its own long-running case against Google’s ad tech business and one theory doing the rounds in the industry is that European regulators were watching the U.S. closely before deciding how far to go with their own. If the European Union’s regulators read this outcome as proof that behavioral remedies are enough, they may follow suit. If it reads the remedies as leaving the real problem of Google’s ownership of both sides of the market untouched, it could push for the structural remedy the DOJ just lost the fight for.