Google's ad tech remedies land, and publishers take what they can get

Judge Leonie Brinkema's behavioural remedies in US v. Google are now unsealed, and the shape of them is clear: Google keeps AdX and DoubleClick for Publishers under a six-year behavioural regime, but the contracts tying them together are no longer enforceable, Google cannot preference its own ad tech in auctions, and it must integrate with Prebid and third-party ad servers. The provisions apply globally, not just in the US. Publishers are trying to sound upbeat. "The behavioral remedies will address some of the issues publishers have been impacted by," News/Media Alliance president Danielle Coffey told AdExchanger. "The upside is the timing and ability to get relief immediately." The jaded counter-read, from a publisher tech executive who asked for anonymity, is that the remedies arrived a decade late: "We're now talking about agentic buying and selling of advertising and the ways that Google's basically killing publisher traffic while still continuing to scrape their content without compensation." Prebid president Garrett McGrath welcomed the ruling, writing that "Prebid welcomes the court's focus on interoperability and competition in digital advertising." The question nobody can answer yet is whether any of it moves money. Sell-side consultant Scott Messer flagged the escape hatch in the ruling's own language: AdWords can still prioritise AdX if it serves "advertisers' objectives," so "you can bet your digital dollars that it will work much better inside of GAM and AdX."

The crux

The remedies punish Google's past conduct without disturbing the structural conditions that keep most publisher revenue inside Google Ad Manager, so the ruling changes little about open-web publisher economics even as it forces interoperability.

Sell-side read

The one concrete upside is the removal of Unified Pricing Rules, which Marketecture's Ari Paparo says lets publishers once again manipulate demand pricing inside GAM to extract better terms from preferred exchanges; migration to another ad server also becomes viable in roughly six months.

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Whether AdWords (Google Ads) demand actually flows to non-AdX exchanges; Paparo notes the AWBid bidder "has been around for over 10 years and still barely works."