• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 17, 2025

Industry executives were not surprised at U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema's ruling Thursday, finding that Google illegally dominated two markets for online advertising technology, but each provided details of how they thought it would influence the ad tech stack.

Brinkema ruled that Google unlawfully monopolized markets for publisher ad servers and the market for ad exchanges sitting between buyers and sellers, but antitrust enforcers failed to prove the company holds a monopoly in advertiser ad networks.

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half," Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president, regulatory affairs, told MediaPost in an email. "The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.” 

Jason Fairchild, CEO at tvScientific and former co-founder of OpenX, described the ruling as a "long-overdue course correction."

"So much of the damage has been done, but I think whatever happens to Google as a result there will be changes across the industry," he said. "The awareness that is brings to all participants in the market is you just cannot compromise on transparency.

He called that “the key lesson.” Buyers need to work with platforms that are not black box and know how the dollars are split up. Sellers must not work with entities that play on either side of the market.

When one company controls the pipes, the platform, and the economics, opacity reigns — and both advertisers and publishers lose, and marketers should not become dependent on nontransparent platforms, he said.

There will be ramifications on the industry, depending on how this plays out in the courts. When Google bought DoubleClick for Publishers, it consolidated the ad server with their ad exchange. At the time it already had a dominant position in advertising with AdWords. 

Fairchild believes the FTC and the DOJ throughout the years have been inconsistent in the way they handle or enforce potential monopolies. During the time Google acquired these companies, these government agencies could have had a more hands-off approach, allowing a free market to emerge. 

"The signs were all there at the time Google acquired the core publishing platform," he said. "They already owned the exchange, and they were the dominant user of the exchange. It was a recipe for disaster, and we saw it play out over two decades."

Johanna Bauman, CMO of PubMatic, believes that when publishers lose control of pricing and advertisers face opaque costs, the entire ecosystem suffers.

“It's our hope that this ruling accelerates the shifts we are already seeing in our industry toward more transparency, efficiency and performance across the open internet,” Bauman said.

Another longtime ad industry executive -- Kevin Lee, executive chairman and founder of Didit -- felt the same way, but expanded on the thought. 

“The common thread that simultaneously creates a lot of the efficiencies and monopolistic power is Google’s identity graph, having the anonymized identifier and knowing the preferences,” Lee said. “There are only three companies that do this, Google, Meta, and Amazon. They each have different datasets.”

Google not only owns the companies that serve the ads, but has the underlying data to serve them in a more relevant way. Ecosystems need a middleman. But does one company need to own the browser, the search engine, the social network, the ad server and other platforms in the ad stack, so it makes revenue every step of the way?

"I don't anticipate Google making any changes until they have a chance to appeal it," Lee said. "One could argue from an investor perspective that Google could be worth more broken up. From a consumer perspective, being deemed a monopoly could be a positive thing for competitors. Google has become a one-stop location to buy any inventory you want, which promotes a monopolistic behavior."

Lee said the bigger question becomes will it get kicked up to the Supreme court and they agree.

While there are pros and cons to both sides, monopolistic or not, Lee said the middleman in the ecosystem that connects the supply to the demand is really important. A court will need to determine if the way Google acts as a middleman provides an unfair advantage. 

"Just because you have monopolistic power doesn't mean you exercise it," Lee said.

Elise Phillips, policy counsel at Public Knowledge, could not have been happier with the news.

“I am thrilled that Judge Brinkema has ruled that Google is a monopolist in the digital advertising space,” she wrote in prepared remarks. “This ruling is a major victory for consumer choice. The judge’s ruling confirms that Google has abused its dominant market position to rig the market in its own favor, stifling innovation and shutting out rivals.”