A shovel is on display as Georgia’s then-Gov. Nathan Deal speaks during a ceremony announcing a $300 million expansion of Google’s data center operations, June 2, 2015, in Lithia Springs, Georgia.
In 2019, a month into my tenure as executive editor at the Prospect, we published an investigation into digital ad markets. The author was Dina Srinivasan, a former executive with advertising giant WPP who saw the corruption of these markets from the inside. She argued that two Big Tech advertising companies, Google and Facebook, had commandeered these markets by relentlessly tracking users across the internet, running the auctions to match users with advertisers, and skimming a huge cut for themselves off the top, something publishers and advertisers could not escape.
“One way to unhook Facebook and Google’s business model over the public at large is through more competition,” Srinivasan wrote. She went on to advise Texas in an antitrust case, which argued that Google’s dominance of advertising technology allows it to rig auctions to benefit its products and extract from publishers. That case is still ongoing, but many of its allegations also appeared in a Justice Department lawsuit filed in 2023. And yesterday, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled for the Justice Department, affirming that Google indeed had monopolized adtech markets in harmful ways.
It’s the third loss for Google in monopolization cases in the past 17 months. Next week, the remedy phase kicks off in the case that found Google liable of monopolizing search engine markets by paying for placement in devices and browsers. And in December 2023, a jury declared that Google ran illegal app store monopolies in a privately litigated case.
At the same time that the adtech verdict came down, the first week of arguments kicked off in Meta’s monopolization trial brought by the FTC, which among other things alleges that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp allowed Meta to so dominate personal social networking that it could impose an “ad load tax” by stuffing more ads into user fees to make more money.
What John Mark Newman has called “the most significant two-week period in the 135-year history of antitrust law” is fundamentally an intellectual victory. Everything Srinivasan laid out in the Prospect in 2019 formed the basis of the cases being won in federal court today. Those arguments are being transformed into real-world actions, with legitimate constraints on the data monopolies we see today. And while Donald Trump has laid waste to many of the positive advancements of the past few years, he hasn’t prevented the continued push to dismantle corporate consolidation—at least not yet.
ADTECH IN 2025 is difficult to explain, but it doesn’t meaningfully differ from what Srinivasan wrote in 2019. Digital advertising created new markets to match advertisers seeking eyeballs to the people who were watching screens all day. Increasingly, these markets became automated and systematized, through what is known as “programmatic” ads. In the background of user clicks to web pages, auctions lasting milliseconds determine what ads users see, making full use of personal information about preferences, purchases, and browsing history.
Over time, Google captured the back-end technology used to sustain this market. After initially just supplying ads on its own suite of products (like ones placed inside user searches), Google bought its way into dominance in so-called “open web” advertising for other websites. Google has a presence on both the “sell side” of the ad network (where advertisers buy ads), and the “buy side” (where publishers sell inventory). The big acquisitions that facilitated this were Google’s purchase of DoubleClick in 2008, and the purchase of Admeld in 2011.
Using “ad exchanges,” advertisers and publishers come together for the real-time auctions. Google is also dominant in that part of the adtech stack, with a product known as AdX that was also once part of DoubleClick. For this service, Google takes a cut of between 30 and 50 percent of all digital advertising.
Google cannot sustain this many blows and remain intact.
According to the ruling, Google holds a monopoly over publisher ad servers, where it has a 91 percent market share with significant barriers to entry. It has degraded features in its publisher ad server (DoubleClick for Publishers, or DFP) with the full knowledge that publishers could not switch away. Internally, it has estimated that it could raise prices for DFP up to 20 percent as well, without losing market share. Google also monopolized the ad exchanges through AdX, which has maintained a 20 percent “take rate” despite other ad exchanges reducing their price. One company offered to pull its take rate down to zero and still couldn’t attract customers from Google.
Google tied these pieces together, so publishers can’t really function without using the whole suite. And they leveraged this monopoly to keep rivals out of the market. “By forcing Google’s publisher customers to use a product they would not necessarily have otherwise used, by making it difficult for rival publisher ad servers to compete on the merits, and by significantly reducing rivals’ market share, the tying of [Google’s publisher ad server] to AdX has had a substantial anticompetitive effect in the publisher ad server market for open-web display advertising,” wrote Judge Brinkema. (The judge found that Google did not monopolize the advertiser-facing side of the market.)
As Matt Stoller points out, perhaps the most important part of this ruling was the judge’s rejection of Google’s attempt to use a 2004 Supreme Court case called Verizon v. Trinko, which has frustrated monopolization cases in the past. Trinko, a unanimous ruling written by the late Antonin Scalia, allowed dominant firms to deny competitors access to their systems. Google contended that this ruling allows for an integrated adtech infrastructure that preferences its own products and refuses to deal with other parties.
But Judge Brinkema argued that Trinko did not create an inalienable right to create monopolies. In this case, Google was blocking its customers from choosing other products in an unregulated advertising market. And Brinkema added that “Plaintiffs presented evidence that Google sacrificed ‘short-run benefits because it was more interested in reducing competition … over the long run by harming its smaller competitor[s].’”
Incredibly, Google lost all three of these cases despite acting to hide its misconduct from law enforcers. In each case, Google has been called out for destroying evidence like chat logs that could have further enlightened the court as to Google’s behavior, or misusing attorney-client privilege to hide other communications. As in the other cases, Judge Brinkema said she would not sanction Google or its lead lawyer Kent Walker at this time, because they lost the case. It’s annoying that Walker and Google are being let off the hook, but it’s telling that they keep being found a monopolist despite trying to cover it up.
THE SECOND PHASE OF THE TRIAL, on remedies, is going to happen quickly, with Brinkema asking for a schedule within a week. That’s in keeping with this court’s quick schedule, incidentally proving that antitrust cases don’t have to be so drawn out. Judge Brinkema reached a verdict before the trial in the Texas case even started, despite the fact that the Justice Department’s case was filed two and a half years later.
This case was brought and won by Jonathan Kanter’s team at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. (Kanter, on Twitter, said, “Today is a huge victory for antitrust enforcement, the media industry, and the free and open internet.”) But it’s Trump’s team, under Gail Slater’s direction, who will have to finish it. They’ve already passed a big test in the Google search case, keeping the proposed remedy relatively intact. We’ll see if they do the same here. Even if they try to settle, there are state attorneys general on this adtech case who could pursue it.
Google cannot sustain this many blows and remain intact. As Stoller notes, the judges overseeing these cases will have to coordinate, and coming up with some complicated remedy they’d all have to monitor is too much. The simplest way to prevent monopolization in the future is to end the monopolization, and force a divestiture. That could allow real competition in digital advertising and billions more for publishers, a sorely needed sharing of fruits of the internet economy with the people who actually make it interesting and compelling.
I don’t think we can be fully confident that Trump won’t meddle in this and other cases. But given that the rest of the government is being stuffed into a blender, the success in this small area is incredible, and it speaks to how the argument about the dangers of market concentration is being won in the halls of power. We’re going to need to rebuild a lot after Trump, but maybe—just maybe—we’ll have a little less to do, if the restructuring of our monopolized economy continues.
