Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

And crucially, there are leaked emails, other evidence that demonstrate (at the very least historical and occasional) corruption of this dual- (multi?) agency arrangement. Among the allegations:

The Google ad exchange favored its own platforms, limiting the ability of other exchanges to compete fairly in bidding for ad inventory. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-giv...

Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on who will win a bid, again to inflate prices. https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-rig...

Google entered market allocation agreements to create an unfair playing field. https://www.winston.com/en/insights-news/avoiding-antitrust-...

When a media buyer puts $1.00 in on one side of the system, on average only $0.60 makes it to the publisher. In some cases less than $0.50 gets to them.

Advertising is an intentionally complex system so that companies can clip the ticket at multiple stages throughout the process. Google should be broken up, but the whole ad tech system needs to go into the bin if these problems are going to ever get fixed.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/02/15/how-muc...

Yeah I’m listening to a legal analyst on Bloomberg radio and there’s a lot of detail that’s getting lost under the headline. It’s not yet even clear yet that Google would need to divest from anything in order to address this.

Bloomberg Radio April 17 2025: https://www.youtube.com/live/iEpJwprxDdk?si=9WaFIJENUwyIJvpk

Google can extract as much money as they want from this equation, up to the limit of available capital for advertising. They just need to squeeze more from publishers and at the same time increase click costs. They have been doing both of these for several years.

At the very least the exchange has to be audited. Currently we have no idea whether the prices are a result of natural supply-demand dynamics or whether the exchange keeps artificially pumping the prices with lackluster demand

There's a lot of unknowns at this point, but here's an industry piece for a more informed perspective on it.

https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/google-is-found-guilty...

It's a lot more complex than that. Google has been caught putting their finger on the scale in the auction process. Not not entirely sure how they did it but I believe they were outbidding third party bidders by a cent because they're downstream in the chain.

Decoupling the advertising marketplace from the platform would be a huge win for consumers. It would also help Google focus on products again instead of constantly bowing to the almighty ad dollar.

Monopolies die after a bit unless governments save them. Monopolies tend to stagnate, become too bureaucratic, and lose the pressure to perform. They then lose to more dynamic competitors. Sears is an example of loss, the banking cartel is example of government interference.

Laws, otoh, are not magic. Making a law doesn’t solve the problem. Laws require people with guns to go enforce them. The government has no incentive to use force against the people lining their pockets, and so laws tend to be enforced primarily on the poor and the working class. Only when the majority of the votes of the public could be swayed will government attack the donor class.

If you look at the actual decision, Google court cases are quoted there many times (Search, Play etc.) as the precedent of e.g. what monopoly is.

| This should be impossible, because there are laws against it.

That’s what so remarkable: we have a robust system of antitrust laws in this country, they just haven’t been enforced in decades. Thank god the Biden admin started trying to use them again, and that Trump hasn’t stopped these cases in their tracks.

If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is communism! Would have probably slept much better at night.

> There's other ad companies, there is no other way to get an app on iOS.

There is no other way to get an ad on sites that use Google Ads, just as there's no other way to get an app on iOS. These seem to be perfectly parallel to me: in either case you can pay a company to get access to their user base or you can choose to not pay that company to get access to their users. But if you make that choice, in either case you're locked out of a large market.

I agree with you that there's a strong argument to be made that the cases should have been decided the same way, but I also think they made the right call with Apple, so that leaves me reevaluating my gut instinct on this one.

> I'm confused how this is a monopoly

An example from the case would be: Google bought Admeld. Then it disabled it's real time bidding feature. This created short term losses for them but gave them long term advantage in market control.

> Even if they play games with the auctions to keep the price up

Then it should be noticed, competitors should form, and the market should move away from this provider. Yet this has not happened because Google keeps buying those competitors.

> and it's not as if anyone is forced to use them.

Technically? Yes. Practically? No.

> that the app store isn't a monopoly, but Google ads are.

Our federal courts are separated into districts. Not all of them use the same precedents and market logic when deciding cases. This is probably why congress passed a law that prevents large companies from removing cases to the district of their choice and instead forces them to hold the case where the prosecutor decides.

The latter point is one reason why this case ended up differently.

> There's other ad companies

Loss leading, exclusive contracts, and price fixing are all crimes that can be committed in that environment. The bar for anti trust isn't "100% market domination." It's actually pretty nuanced. That's a good thing.

Um, no, the market is obviously not defined as “google ads.” You could bother to do one single search (maybe even with google!) before spewing nonsense.

Specifically, part of the case found google liable for “unlawfully [tying] its publisher ad server and ad exchange” in violation of the Sherman antitrust act. Basically, google has locked down both the supply side (sites with space the sell for ads) and demand side (market of advertisers bidding on that space) so it can play both sides - and (crucially!) it has integrated them so as to lock in both advertisers and publishers. That’s how you unfairly build a monopoly.

And funny that you use the App Store as an example. Two years ago google lost an antitrust case brought by epic games about their android store practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Google?wprov=sft...

Web ads are bearable for me most of the time, but I'm dismayed by ads in mobile games my kids play. Unskippable 30 second videos that peddle poorly made F2P games.

I manage to keep them mostly out of it by paying for worthy games and deleting the rest.

However I would in fact happily welcome _some_ ads. Ones that would simply inform me of existence of masterpieces like Tiny Bubbles or Monument Valley rather than peddle anything. This idea of a tiny ad network with curated content comes up in my head often. Sure it won't make any money it would do some good.

If we must have ads, the best quality ads I see online are dumb ads. Just an image as a link. The most effective ads I see are ones on blogs where the blogger sells ad space (side columns) and they're just images that directly link to the product. The ads are relevant to the blog and readers. 99% of other online ads I see are visual garbage and irrelevant. The "targeting" is abysmal.

Convincing all of these sites that Google, Meta, or other services, are "superior" for ads genuinely seems like incredible marketing. They've siphoned up enormous amounts of money and in return put in place a miserable user experience while making media companies wholly reliant on them.

You might be interested in The Trade Desk and their Sellers and Publishers 500. It focuses on only quality content and quality ads. https://www.thetradedesk.com/resources/what-is-sellers-publi...

I think at the beginning Google was the good one keeping display ads high quality, so that even some ad blocking lists didn't remove them straight away. But yeah, today it is impossible to browse some sites or use apps without being tricked into endless maze of close button. And when I see Temu ads I throw up.

I think the deed is done. We are never going back to "good" ads anymore. The market's greatest revenue makers are those who are dumb ad clickers. We need more intrusive ads to get them on board now. The smart ones can still use adblock.

I'd use the web more without an adblocker if this were the case.

The exact company you're asking for existed already, almost two decades ago. It was called Project Wonderful, and initially focused on independent blogs and webcomics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful

It never managed more than modest success and never expanded far outside its initial sphere. It shut down in 2018 because it was unable to compete with all the monopolist walled garden ad spaces.

There are various small projects that could claim to be successors to that ethos -- but (to a rounding error) no one has heard of them because, contrary to your claim, the revealed "premium" that users place on "quality ads" is dwarfed by the premium that advertisers place on aggressive attention vampires (and the latter are the ones actually paying)

This is not that case. This case is about how Google only serves certain ad inventory to people who use their products.

Online advertising isn't limited to ads in search results. They can include ads everywhere and work as a platform for others as well.

You're mixing up antitrust cases. The 2020 case [0], decided in August and going into remedies in a week or so, was about search. This one is about advertising [1], a separate market that the DOJ has argued Google has also been acting anticompetitively in.

Aside from that:

> now AI is taking over, which will further weaken their grip.

Maybe you've missed that they're pulling ahead of OpenAI on the AI front?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...

Well they certainly gained dominance by being the best and I would say they still are the best. But maybe there was some competitor that could have usurped them by being even better if not for their anticompetitive tactics. I wouldn't put money against that...

> Google is on top because they do the best job

Companies become monopolies often through doing their job the best. Companies stay the best because they're monopolies.

There's really only one alternative, Bing. Virtually all the other western search engines are using the Bing api, and just slightly modify the results.

> Google is on top because they do the best job

You think a court hasn't considered that angle?

Really? Even non-technical people are waking up and seeing the 3 in web3 stands for India, OnlyFans and AI content.

As someone who runs a large platform in the music niche, every independent interesting webapp in the kpop community besides me has been killed by Google's ceaseless enshittification and I'd be thrilled if everyone who worked there had their stock options reduced to 0 to atone for what they've done to the internet.

Being a monopoly, in itself, isn’t illegal. The question is whether the company maintains its monopoly through illegal tactics or leverages that monopoly in illegal manners.

(NYT really ought to add “illegal” to their title.)

Google is playing all sides of the dice. They used adsense to enlist publishers. They used adwords to get marketers. They used an ad buying and selling platform to corner the entire ad line.

Google bought Doubleclick for $3 Billion. Today it is worth $22 Billion. When Google got into ad-tech, they drifted away from their core market: users. And started to endorse the other side that turned users into products.

("Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist")

Everything else. Cloud provider, operating systems, browsers, hosting business apps, phone licenser, Internet provider, smart home manufacturer, and various moonshots. Their ad company is a monopoly because of those other services.

Google as an ad company that can't leverage those other lines of business to gain an advantage over other ad companies still has a viable ad business. They can compete on the basis of that lone company's strengths.

("If you're nothing without this suit, then you shouldn't have it")

The original Google research paper by Brin and Page explicitly points out that a search engine financed by advertising is inherently anti-consumer:

> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

Kind of funny how they basically predicted Google's degradation years in advance.