On Thursday, a judge ruled Google is guilty of breaching anti-trust laws by monopolising the markets for publisher advertising servers and ad exchanges, as well as for illegally tying its servers to those exchanges.

Google will appeal. Google was found not guilty of a third charge of running a monopoly of the overall ad network market.

What it means for news publishers

We know this is a big legal boost for the class actions that several thousands of publishers have jointly brought against Google for damages caused by its adtech dominance across Europe, U.K., North America, and Australia, among others.

The U.K. case is the biggest in numbers of publishers because its laws allowed for automatic participation of all publishers, but the EU case seeks the biggest penalties.

What it means for the ad ecosystem

We don’t know the remedies the court will impose (see below), but we know all of them will shake up how advertising is bought and sold across the Web.

This will involve all forms of automated trading. A break-up on its own won’t solve the transparency issues that any new owner(s) would be required to fix. The Trump Administration has signalled it will continue to support the DOJ case.

Details of the case

The U.S. Department of Justice and a group of U.S. states combined in 2023 to sue Google, alleging its monopoly in adtech allowed it charge high prices and denying competitive bidding for ads on the Internet. They alleged Google locked Web publishers into using its software and tools and operated an opaque bidding market.

It is important to understand this DOJ adtech case has nothing to do with the concurrent anti-trust case against Google in search, although remedies might overlap. That case likely springs into its final phase next week.

Possible outcomes

Possible actions will be discussed next (timeline to be agreed next week by the parties). The Department of Justice wants Google to break up its technology on the sell-side, specifically Google Ad Manager.

Other options include forcing different kinds of splits between ad server and ad exchange. Another path and far short of a break-up would be mandating full transparency for a stand-alone auction system, possibly held as a capped-profit or non-profit entity.

Google may be happy to dismantle or exit the low-margin adtech game given its wider AI priorities and other issues.

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