The Google Ad Tech Remedies Matter to You, Too

Lisa Macpherson is policy director at Public Knowledge.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Virginia issued an order on remedies in the Google ad-tech antitrust case. I’m disappointed in the order, and you should be, too.

Yes, you, even if you’re not a policy wonk like me. In the fall of 2024, I wrote a post for Tech Policy Press explaining why, despite all its legal complexities, the Google ad tech case matters for everyone. Leveraging my own ringside seat to the development and evolution of digital advertising since the 1990’s, I made the case that “Google’s dominant control of the advertising technology market has hurt advertisers and publishers… but also consumers – by imposing on privacy, fueling disinformation, reducing the diversity of viewpoints online, increasing barriers to news, reducing innovation by brands, and increasing prices on goods and services.” Judge Leonie Brinkema’s remedies order means Google’s dominant control of the advertising technology market will continue – and so, likely, will its detrimental impacts.

Google is an illegal monopolist in advertising technology. That was Judge Brinkema’s decision in her April 2025 ruling in the antitrust lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice and several states in 2023. The ruling confirmed that Google’s acquisitions and consolidation of the so-called ad tech stack – the layers of software that broker and execute advertising buys by advertisers from publishers – into its Ad Exchange (AdX) represented anti-competitive behavior, and that the consolidation allowed other anti-competitive behaviors like tying, self-preferencing, and price manipulation. To compensate for these effects, advertisers needed to pay more for ads (even while losing visibility to whether or where they ran), and publishers needed to build higher paywalls to sustain their business. We urged Judge Brinkema to adopt strong remedies and even proposed some in the public interest.

Judge Brinkema’s new ruling does not force Google to sell AdX, or make any structural changes, for that matter (note: the full decision remains under seal). Google will still own both its ad server and the exchange and the conflict of interest they entail. Instead, the decision changes how the exchange can operate its auctions. Assuming the actual remedies include robust enforcement mechanisms, the best it will do is reduce some of Google’s advantages in visibility, access, and leverage over publishers’ inventory or pricing.

The ruling also confirms, as did the Google search case before it, how slow and uncertain litigation can be to solve for anti-competitive behaviors on the part of multi-trillion-dollar corporations operating in dynamic marketplaces. We need more than that. For example, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), reintroduced in the Senate this past June, would ban dominant platforms from engaging in anti-competitive behaviors like self-preferencing, tying, and using private data, and it would require interoperability and data portability across platforms. The Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability Act (AMERICA Act), reintroduced in the Senate in 2025, is even more specifically aimed at the ad tech market; among other provisions, it prohibits dominant firms from owning more than one part of the ad-buying and selling process (such as owning both an ad exchange and a publisher tool). And we need a dedicated digital regulator to account for changes in the marketplace in the future.

As I noted in my previous post, “We need to open up digital markets to bring about more competition and more choice if we want an advertising system that works for the rest of us.” This decision, based on what we know today, does little to ensure that.