Instead, the tech behemoth received a series of small orders designed to fix the monopolies. These include connecting its ad exchange AdX and its publisher ad server DFP to Prebid, requiring them to play by the same rules as everyone else, requiring AdX bids to alternative publisher ad servers to offer the same terms as they would to DFP, limiting self-preferencing in the adtech stack, and sharing data on ad auction wins and losses with publishers.
In short: Google’s adtech business gets to walk away largely unscathed.
Though Google might be riding high on the outcome (particularly after a different federal judge who previously ruled that Google’s search business was an illegal monopoly also let the company off the hook with little more than a wrist slap), one adland heavyweight might be more salty: The Trade Desk.
The largest indie demand-side platform, The Trade Desk, built its business and go-to-market strategy as the alternative to Google. The court’s ruling on remedies, however, has left Google’s empire structurally intact.
When it debuted on the Nasdaq a decade ago, it had a simple proposition: Its neutral tech could offer ad buyers a better version of what they were getting with the closed, vertically integrated ecosystems of the tech giants.
In 2018, the company launched an identity resolution tool, Unified ID, or UID, to establish a free, shared industry ID, and, per CEO Jeff Green, “to make sure certain players, particularly Google, didn’t have an unfair cookie coverage advantage over the rest of the internet.” Within two years, UID was reportedly the most ubiquitous ID in bid requests across the open web.
