Yesterday’s ruling that Google does not have to sell off AdX brings an end to the prospect of the search giant’s ad tech business being broken up. The decision follows Judge Leonie Brinkema’s ruling last year that Google had wilfully monopolised both the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets. The judge has now rejected the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) attempt to force a sale of the ad exchange, but accepted most of the tech giant’s proposed behavioral remedies.
VideoWeek asked four industry experts for their reactions to the ruling.
Rich Ashton, Managing Partner, FirstPartyCapital
It’s disappointing, but not surprising. Two monopoly findings against Google in two years, two judges declining to do anything structural. That tells you where the ceiling on antitrust enforcement sits, and Google will have priced that in already.
Behavioural remedies are only worth what the enforcement behind them is worth. The DOJ’s argument was that Google cannot be trusted to police itself, and nothing in this ruling answers that. Bid transparency, scrapping Unified Pricing Rules, and killing first and last look are real if they are properly monitored, and cosmetic if they are not.
The switching problem is untouched. A publisher that wants a different ad server still risks its Google demand, which is the tie the court found illegal in the first place.
For independent ad tech, this is an opening rather than a win.
Xanthe Pickford-Avery, Digital Leader, the7stars
Based on what’s public so far, I’m not surprised. The judge had already signalled her scepticism about a breakup, and forcing a company to sell off assets is rare.
What she has ordered isn’t nothing. Google will have to share bid data with rival ad servers and give publishers back real control over their own pricing. That’s a meaningful shift in how the open web auction works.
But Google still owns both sides of the marketplace, and rules like these only work if someone enforces them for years.
The real question is whether this is a fight that’s already being overtaken. The whole case is built around an open web where people click through to publisher sites, and AI search is quietly removing that click. We may have won a fairer auction just as the market it governs starts to shrink.
Tom Laband, CEO and Co-Founder, Adsquare
It’s an interesting outcome; while the breakup wasn’t ordered, the remedies (real-time bid transparency, no more unified pricing, first-look and last-look banned) are a direct response to years of complaints about walled-garden opacity. So in that sense the ruling validates what independent players have been saying for a while.
But behavioral fixes are only as good as the monitoring can enforce, and Google still owns both sides of the exchange. For brands and agencies, that’s a reminder that enforcement moves slower than the market; if you want campaign outcomes you can actually defend (pricing, targeting, attribution) that verification has to come from a partner with no stake in whose media wins the auction, not from a court order.
Nandi Gurprasad, Board and M&A Advisor
It’s ironic that the same judge ruled last year that Google had “wilfully” built an illegal monopoly in online advertising using anti-competitive practices such as privileged contracts, yet denied the request to break up the ad tech business. Some serious lobbying and/or defense prevailed here. Perhaps it’s not a sale of assets but an alternative solution, but either way it should never be a case of “too big to break up”. The precedent here could be Netscape vs Microsoft, which didn’t lead to a sale of assets.
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