The Department of Justice (DOJ) knows exactly what it wants Google to do in order to restore competition in the ad tech space. Based on a new filing, the DOJ wants Google to divest its ad exchange product AdX, along with a “phased” sale of DoubleClick for Publishers. That’s an ad server for website publishers, essentially.
This all comes after Google lost a trial against the DOJ quite recently. The company lost that trial in mid-April, while the remedies trial has been set for this Fall. So we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what will happen.
The DOJ has a fix for Google’s ad tech monopoly, or it thinks it does
In any case, the DOJ said that Google had “ensured that publishers would lose significant revenue if they did not use AdX.” Google is accused of creating a monopoly by integrating AdX and DFP, which essentially forces websites to use Google’s publisher products, it is alleged.
The DOJ also wants Google to open up its ad buying tools, including AdWords. It would be ideal if AdWords would work with third-party ad tech products with “respect to bidding, matching, placement of ads, or provision of information, except at the express instruction of an advertiser.”
The Department of Justice says that the “divestiture of Google’s unlawfully obtained monopolies and the products that were the principal instruments of Google’s illegal scheme” is “necessary to terminate Google’s monopolies.”
Those moves are expected to “reintroduce competition into the ad exchange and publisher ad server markets, and guard against reoccurrence in the future”, the DOJ’s filing says.
Google did make a quite response to this, while pointing to its remedies suggestions
Google did respond to this. The company’s VP of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said that such moves would only harm publishers and advertisers. “The DOJ conceded Google’s proposed ad tech remedy fully addresses the Court’s decision on liability. The DOJ’s additional proposals to force a divestiture of our ad tech tools go well beyond the Court’s findings, have no basis in law, and would harm publishers and advertisers.”
Google even proposed its set of remedies in a separate filing. Those include making AdX real-time bids available to all third-party ad servers. Google also proposed that its action be kept under an independent compliance observer for three years.
We’ll see what will happen during the remedies case this Fall. Google will file in a complaint following that, that much is for sure. As a reminder, Google is currently in the middle of the remedies case for its Search dominance.
