The U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division says it has won “substantial relief” in its monopolisation case against Google in advertising technology markets.
In United States et al. v. Google LLC, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ordered significant behavioural relief, including requiring close integration between Google’s products and rivals’ products, including the open-source solutions offered by Prebid, the DOJ said in a statement, adding that the court also ordered further relief to help pry open these markets to competition.
“The court’s ruling in the Google ad tech case marks a significant victory for this department’s efforts to protect and restore competition,” said associate attorney general Stanley Woodward Jr. “We will continue to review the opinion to consider the Department’s options. Under President Trump’s and Attorney General Blanche’s leadership, we will never cease fighting for fair competition.”
As a direct result of the DOJ trial team’s work, the statement noted that Google’s executives repeatedly offered new pledges of injunctive relief while on the stand during the remedies trial. This continued after the trial, when Google offered a further revised proposed final judgment with additional concessions, the statement said.
“For example, Google committed that AdWords, its advertiser tool, would not engage in discriminatory bidding to the detriment of both advertisers and publishers. Because of the Department’s efforts during the remedies phase, Google also agreed to broaden the categories of advertising inventory covered by the final judgment, disclose how its black-box advertising auctions work, and provide new technical support and data to its competitors and customers. These actions highlight the strong case the Department put on at trial,” said DOJ.
According to it, the court’s decision recognises that it must seek to terminate Google’s monopolies, free the markets from Google’s anticompetitive conduct, ensure that no practices remain likely to result in monopolisation, and deny Google the fruit of its unlawful actions: its monopoly power, scale, and profits. In so holding, the court rejected Google’s argument that terminating monopolies is not a proper objective in monopolisation cases.
It said the court confirmed the DOJ’s position that ordering Google to stop its prior anticompetitive behaviour is not enough and imposed interoperability and data-sharing requirements, anti-discrimination remedies, and prohibitions on Google’s self-preferencing bidding behaviour.
It pointed out that the ruling “underscores” the need for forward-looking, comprehensive antitrust remedies and reiterates that remedies can include conditions on products beyond the monopolised product markets.
According to the statement, the court ordered that Google must create and support integrations between AdX and Prebid, and DFP and Prebid. Prebid is an open-source industry standard for real-time bidding. In addition, AdX must submit real-time bids to other publisher ad servers. These integrations will give publishers more control over the sale of their inventory and provide access to important, unique demand without forcing publishers to use both DFP and AdX.
Additionally, it said the court also imposed meaningful data-sharing requirements on Google. Google must allow publishers to access and export their own data from DFP and AdX, making it easier for publishers to switch ad tech providers.
