Google has been ordered to make significant changes to its online advertising business across the world due to violations of U.S. antitrust laws.
In a 106-page opinion U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said the $4 trillion tech giant must overhaul its rules governing online advertising auctions to allow for ‘much-needed competition.’
The judge said the remedies she laid out would be ‘sufficient to effectively pry open to competition the ad tech markets that were injured by Google’s unlawful conduct,’ and would ‘prevent Google from reverting to anticompetitive conduct in these markets.’
Her opinion follows the judge’s ruling last year that Google violated antitrust laws in relation to open-web display advertising – the ads that appear in boxes at the top and sides of web pages.
Income from selling that space helps sustain online publishers, including news organizations, who are facing hits to digital advertising revenue amid the rapid emergence of AI.
In open-web display advertising Google owns the platforms that publishers use to sell their ad space and the tools that advertisers use to buy it, along with AdX, a stock market-like exchange where the instantaneous transactions occur.
Historically, Google has taken more than 30 cents on the dollar in revenue from each ad passing through that system, including a 20 percent fee from publishers for using AdX.
Google violated U.S. antitrust laws in open-web display advertising and a judge laid out a series of remedies including data sharing, transparency and oversight
In her ruling last year, Brinkema found Google violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act by ‘willfully engaging in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power,’ and by tying together AdX and the tools publishers use to sell ad space.
Those actions ‘deprived rivals of the ability to compete’ and ‘substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.’
In her full opinion, unsealed at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Wednesday, Brinkema outlined a series of ‘behavioral remedies,’ a set of rules by which Google must conduct itself in future.
The measures include that publishers using Google’s ad server technology to sell space will not be required to also use AdX, untying the illegal link between the company’s two tools.
Google must also share more data, permanently cease practices that publishers had complained kept them locked into using the company’s products, and end preferential and discriminatory auction bidding practices that benefitted itself.
Brinkema said publishers being able to see real-time bids from AdX, using other ad servers, would restore ‘much-needed’ competition.
She also outlined the establishment of a Monitor and Technical Committee, which will conduct oversight of Google for six years, although that could be extended if it is not in compliance.
Google must also appoint an internal antitrust compliance monitor to ensure it sticks to the new rules.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a 106-page opinion detailing measures for Google’s future conduct
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr said the court’s ruling was a ‘significant victory’ for the Department of Justice
The judge said the oversight was necessary due to the ‘gravity’ of Google’s antitrust violations in the case, which was brought by the Department of Justice and others.
Following the opinion, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr said: ‘The court’s ruling in the Google ad tech case marks a significant victory for this department’s efforts to protect and restore competition.
Google said it disagreed with Brinkema’s original ruling that it violated antitrust laws, and will appeal
The DOJ had wanted Google to be forced to sell off AdX, arguing the Silicon Valley company could not be trusted to run it.
Two weeks ago, Brinkema revealed that she had stopped short of making Google divest AdX.
In her full opinion the judge said forcing a sale was ‘neither realistic nor needed.’
The DOJ’s ‘rationale for seeking divestiture boils down to a lack of trust that Google will comply with an order from this court and an unrealistic desire for certainty,’ she wrote.
She said the exchange transacts various forms of advertising, including app and instream video, and the DOJ’s ‘proposed divesture of AdX would have an effect on other Google products and services beyond the conduct plaintiff seeks to redress.’
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia where the case was heard
In relation to whether the measures in the opinion should apply globally, Google had argued the court ‘should not impose an injunction that would operate outside the nation’s borders,’ but Brinkema took the opposite view.
She wrote: ‘For Google, a worldwide application of the final judgment would entail product changes that are consistent across all regions, in line with its current operations.’
Last year, the European Commission fined Google €2.95 billion ($3.5 billion) and it is pursuing remedies over the company’s breaches of antitrust rules in the European Union.
Meanwhile, in December, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel in New York granted class action status to thousands of publishers who claim Google abused its market power and overcharged them for for its advertising technology services between 2016 and 2024.
They are seeking damages of more than $1.7 billion. Google denies wrongdoing.
The closely-watched case in Virginia began in 2023, under the Biden administration, when the DOJ and the Attorneys General of more than a dozen states sued Google.
A trial before Brinkema the following year saw government lawyers detail how Google controlled both sides of the market for open-web display advertising.
They told the court how a senior Google executive had once likened the company’s position to Goldman Sachs owning the New York Stock Exchange.
Witnesses from media organizations including The Daily Mail, Gannett, which owns USA Today, and News Corp., which publishes The Wall Street Journal, told the court they had to use Google’s advertising technology, and that it was costing them revenue that could otherwise be used to boost journalism.
Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet
At the conclusion of that trial, Brinkema found that the Silicon Valley giant’s conduct had ‘substantially harmed’ publishers and consumers.
She found that the AdX exchange and the technology used by publishers to sell advertising space amounted to an illegal monopoly, and that Google unlawfully locked publishers into using AdX.
Last year, there were further court proceedings as Google and the DOJ argued what the remedies should be.
The case has been part of a wider effort by the DOJ to rein in Big Tech.
In 2024, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in online search, but rejected the DOJ’s attempt to force a sale of its Chrome browser.
