Report from AdExchanger
In Brief – Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema’s 106-page remedies order in the US government’s antitrust case against Google’s advertising technology business has been released publicly. Brinkema rejected the Justice Department’s call to force Google to sell its Google Ad Exchange (AdX) business and instead packaged extensive operational changes, including building API integrations connecting AdX and Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP) to Prebid, a leading open-source header-bidding framework, providing real-time AdX bids to rival publisher ad servers on terms equivalent to those offered to DFP, and sharing real-time bid data, including winning and losing bids, with publishers. While DFP does not have to open-source its auction logic as the DOJ requested, Google must publish technical documentation explaining how DFP selects winners, including pricing and bid adjustments. On the ad buying side, its AdWords service is barred from bidding directly into DFP, favoring Google’s own ad-tech tools, or using first-party data to advantage Google’s advertising infrastructure. A court-appointed technical monitor will oversee compliance for at least six years and the remedies apply globally. The final judgment remains pending.
Context – Brinkema is the second federal judge to find Google guilty of violating federal antitrust law but reject the government’s request to enforce a structural remedy requiring parts of its business empire to be sold off. Judge Amit Mehta followed a similar path in the DOJ’s search antitrust case, refusing to order the sale of the Chrome browser or the Android operating system. Attention now shifts to Brussels, where the European Commission has hit Google with a $3.45 billion fine for similar AdTech practices, ordered Google to end self-preferencing practices and conflicts of interest, and where leading EU officials have indicated that “selling some part of its AdTech business” was likely needed. Following this US court decision, demanding a sale will add to US-EU friction. Besides, the chief anxiety for online publishers and independent AdTech is now how they will fare as chatbot sessions replace a growing share of traditional internet traffic.