Google must open its advertising tools to competitors and submit to six years of outside oversight under a ruling in the Justice Department's ad tech monopolization case. The US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia found for the government in United States et al. v. Google LLC, ordering a package of behavioral remedies.
The court's central target was the tie between Google's AdX exchange and its DFP ad server. Both products must now work with Prebid, an open-source standard for real-time bidding that publishers use to solicit competing bids. AdX will also have to submit its real-time bids to other publisher ad servers, a change the court intends to give publishers more say over how their inventory is sold.
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The ruling bars AdWords from bidding directly into DFP. Google had argued the remedies could not reach AdWords, but the court rejected that position. The department's announcement refers to AdWords as Google's "golden goose." A monitor will be installed to enforce compliance with the Final Judgment, with Google under the monitor's and a technical committee's oversight for six years, matching the term of the judgment itself.
The court turned aside Google's argument that ending monopolies is not a proper goal for a remedy. It held that remedies must terminate monopolies and deny Google the fruits of unlawful conduct. The order also imposes interoperability and data-sharing requirements, anti-discrimination provisions, and a ban on self-preferencing in Google's bidding behavior. Remedies may extend to products beyond the markets where monopolization was found.
During the remedies trial, Google executives took the stand and pledged new injunctive relief, and the company later filed a revised proposed final judgment with further concessions. Google committed that AdWords would not discriminate in bidding against advertisers or publishers. It agreed to widen the set of advertising inventory categories the judgment covers, to explain how its black-box auctions work, and to give competitors and customers new technical support and data.
The Justice Department said it is still reviewing the opinion to decide its next steps. Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. called the outcome a significant win for the department's competition work. "The Court's ruling in the Google ad tech case marks a significant victory for this Department's efforts to protect and restore competition," he said.
The department's announcement does not mention a fine, a divestiture, or a deadline for Google to build the required integrations. The case follows a string of antitrust setbacks for Google, including a jury verdict in the Epic Games case that its app store actions were illegal. Google charged developers a 30% cut and offered a 26% rate for alternative payment options, and it planned to appeal that verdict.
