Google Ad Tech Remedies Show Need for Legislation

This month, the federal judge in Virginia who declared Google an illegal monopolist made public her ruling on remedies. As a colleague of mine recently foreshadowed in a post in Tech Policy Press, the remedies stopped well short of actually preventing future abuses of monopoly power and show the continued need for legislation. The unsealed memorandum shows that the court found that calls to break up Google’s ad-tech empire are “neither realistic nor needed” and that behavioral remedies designed to alter Google’s monopolistic behavior are all that are necessary to “pry open” competition.

Quick refresher: US Judge Leonie Brinkema found in April 2025 that Google’s digital ad-tech empire was an illegal monopoly. Google’s acquisition and consolidation of the ad-tech stack (the layers of software that broker and execute advertising buys by advertisers from publishers) into its Ad Exchange (AdX) was anti-competitive behavior. Said consolidation allowed other anti-competitive behaviors like tying, self-preferencing and price manipulation. As a result, advertisers needed to pay more for ads (even while losing visibility into whether or where they ran), and publishers needed to build higher paywalls to sustain their business.

So what are the behavioral remedies that will supposedly alter Google’s behavior away from its monopolistic past? On their face, they might seem likely to accomplish something. First, Google cannot require publishers that use its ad server, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), to also use AdX. Second, AdX and DFP must be integrated with Prebid, the open-source software that lets publishers invite multiple ad exchanges to bid for ad space. Third, AdX must make real-time bids available to rival publisher ad servers. Fourth, publishers get to access and export their data from AdX and DFP. Fifth, AdX and DFP can’t discriminate to favor Google’s products. And finally, a court-appointed monitor will police Google’s compliance.

As nice as these remedies sound, they don’t actually remove the incentive for Google to favor its own products; Google still owns both its ad server and exchange along with the conflicts of interest therein. We have a history of Google showing its commitments aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. In 2007 Google bought ad-tech company DoubleClick and promised it would not combine the web browsing data from DoubleClick with the user data from existing Google assets — a promise broken in 2016. In 2024 French regulators fined Google for breaking four of seven commitments made in 2022 to address competition concerns with news publishers. No wonder privacy expert Alan Chapell called Google “brilliant at playing the behavioral remedies game.”

And then there is the weakness of the compliance monitoring. On the one hand, the monitor is supposed to immediately report if Google is failing to comply with the remedies. On the other hand, Google is allotted a minimum of 30 days to respond to any concern the monitor may have about a violation (so “immediately” means after 30 days). Ad-tech executives expressed concern before the unsealing of the order that even if Google tried to bend but not break a remedy, the complaint would get dragged out in the courts for months to the point that by the time any relief was granted, the damage was done. Providing Google with a “broad right to object” (the ruling’s words, not mine) sets up the remedies for failure.

Between the remedies here and in the Google search case, it has become clear that existing law alone is not enough to rein in Big Tech companies even when they’re found liable for engaging in illegal behavior. This is especially frustrating as the Federal Trade Commission just filed a complaint showing exactly what a company can do when it controls multiple sides of a digital advertising ecosystem: It alleged that Amazon used hidden surcharges to extract $20 billion from ad customers.

Fortunately, there is bipartisan legislation that gets at the heart of the problem of monopolistic digital ad tech. The Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability (AMERICA) Act prohibits companies from owning more than one part of the digital ad ecosystem if they take in over $20 billion in digital ad revenue. Under this requirement, Google could keep only one entity among its ad exchange AdX, supply-side platform DFP, or demand-side platforms Google Ads and DV360. This would eliminate the conflicts that drive Google’s digital ad monopoly.

Additionally, the bill requires companies that make over $5 billion in digital ad revenue and provide either supply- or demand-side services to act in the best interests of their customers. That would prevent Amazon from adding surcharges that, by their own admission, brought no value to customers and only served to increase its revenue.

As we’ve noted in Tech Policy Press twice now, “We need to open up digital markets to bring about more competition and more choice if we want an advertising system that works for the rest of us.” It has become clear that we’ll need AMERICA for that to happen.