The Positives And Negatives Of A Potential Google Ad Tech Breakup | AdExchanger (2025)

The ruling is official: Google’s ad tech business is a monopoly.

So what happens now?

There’s been no official announcement of a court-mandated remedy to Google’s anticompetitive practices. But Judge Leonie Brinkema’s decision centered on Google’s efforts to advantage itself in the SSP and ad server markets, and Google’s bundling of its SSP and ad server as one product, which gives some idea of which business units and practices the court might be targeting.

More competition between SSPs and ad servers should be a boon for publishers in the long term, as well as non-Google ad tech providers and media buyers. At least that’s going to be the government’s argument.

But there will be some growing pains for publishers if there is a sudden disruption in Google’s ad payouts. Some sites might long for the good old days of Google dominance – unless, of course, programmatic marketplace improves such that CPMs go up.

AdExchanger spoke to publisher execs and SSP and identity tech experts about what they’ll be keeping an eye on as the verdict and eventual remedies unfold.

Auction transparency

Why might publishers regret Google’s monopoly being disassembled?

Currently, demand from Google Ads is, in most cases, accessible only via Google’s AdX SSP (although Google does send Google Ads demand to third-party SSPs for some retargeting campaigns).

The only way publishers can access real-time pricing data about Google Ads demand is by using Google’s ad server, formerly known as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). And DFP is bundled alongside AdX into one unified product known as Google Ad Manager (GAM).

By using GAM, publishers get access to AdX and the DFP ad server. The DFP server is also a free value-add for AdX clients. However, offering both products together, alongside access to Google Ads demand, has allowed Google to collect a much larger share of ad revenue than most other SSPs – with Google’s take rate reportedly being as high as 30% or more.

Other SSPs, by comparison, typically have take rates around 10%, according to Scott Cunningham, chair of the Brand Safety Institute’s Publisher Council and lead on the Local Media Consortium’s NewsPassID initiative.

In addition to its lofty take rate, Google also retains valuable auction data locked within its walled garden. This practice has harmed publishers and advertisers, said Kyle Dozeman, chief revenue officer, Americas, at the SSP PubMatic.

“Publishers lost control over their autonomy, their revenue strategies and their ability to work with advertisers in the ways that they want,” Dozeman said. This loss of autonomy is caused by a “lack of transparency in auctions and demand, and lack of control in how they connect to that demand,” he said.

And, Dozeman added, advertisers are handicapped by “unclear pricing, inability to measure performance and unclear paths to supply,” all of which makes it harder for them to optimize campaigns.

Some commonly floated remedies would involve breaking down Google’s advantageous access to auction data. Google could be made to divest or spin off parts of its ad tech business, including potentially its SSP and ad server. Google could also simply decouple the ad server from the SSP. Judge Brinkema noted in her decision that, although Google united DFP and AdX in a single rebranded business – GAM – those remain distinct markets.

Another remedy could be for Google to create a Prebid adapter for AdX, which would position AdX as just another SSP in the publisher header bidding workflow.

Creating a Prebid adapter for AdX should be part of any proposed remedy, since it would create an equal playing field across the board, Cunningham said. “Regardless of whether or not these things get broken up, routing AdX into a Prebid adapter is exceptionally important.”

But, however it occurs, decoupling Google Ads demand from Google’s SSP and ad server is necessary to improve competition in the programmatic supply chain, Cunningham said. It could also bring publishers increased transparency into Google’s auction dynamics.

“Most publishers will tell you that the entire [Google] model is a black box to them in trying to understand why AdX performed better than other [SSPs],” Cunningham said.

Google typically wins “an outsized amount of impressions in the open market,” said Justin Barton, SVP of digital strategy and partnerships at Black Enterprise. “Whether that’s because of the vast amount of demand they have or because they’re putting their finger on a scale remains to be seen.”

Barton said he can’t say for sure that Google’s dominance in programmatic advertising has negatively impacted Black Enterprise’s business. But he added that he hopes the impact that Google’s monopoly power has had on publisher monetization will become more apparent if SSPs compete with AdX directly.

Other publisher sources were less diplomatic in their assessment of Google’s monopolistic impacts on their business.

“This is a big day for the news media industry after enduring so many years of extortionist fees and diminishing ad revenue from Google’s abuse of its market power,” said Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance. She said Google’s opacity has “a very real impact on our ability to invest in quality journalism.”

Ad server impacts

However, the Google verdict might not be all good news for publishers.

Black Enterprise’s Barton highlighted a potential negative impact if AdX is separated from the DFP ad server; namely, that publishers would lose access to a free ad server and would therefore pay for access to either Google’s ad server or another third-party ad server.

For example, in addition to using Google’s ad server for display inventory, Black Enterprise uses video ad servers that often collect a $0.25 CPM fee on every transaction, Barton said. And he’s been pitched on other video ad servers that carry $1 or $2 CPM fees. So losing access to a free display ad server could balloon overall ad server costs, he said.

But it’s equally possible that improved competition in the ad server market could drive down prices, he added. And other SSPs might offer free or low-cost ad servers if portions of Google’s reported 90% share of the ad server market come up for grabs.

Plus, publishers would be freed up to experiment with different ad servers that might fit their unique needs, rather than defaulting to Google’s ad server, he said.

Of course, while Google’s ad server is often positioned as a publisher freebie, the actual cost of the product is baked into the fees Google charges to access its unique demand, PubMatic’s Dozeman said.

Because Google keeps auction data close to the vest, he said “publishers have been unable to optimize yield effectively across one of the largest curves of demand in the internet,” If publishers could improve their yield tactics for all the demand currently channeled through the Google black box, he added, it would more than make up for any additional ad server costs.

ID and search implications

Regardless of Google’s SSP and ad exchange remedies, shouldn’t the problems and opportunities for identity tech be pretty much the same even after a potential Google breakup?

If anything, the ruling against Google could extend the life span of persistent identifiers like third-party cookies, device IDs and IP addresses that Google and others have made efforts to phase out, said Jason Bier, general counsel and chief privacy officer at Adstra, a company that specializes in audience and identity solutions.

Because of the power of Google’s ad tech monopoly, the company was in a position to deprecate certain identifiers favored by the programmatic industry in favor of solutions like the Chrome Privacy Sandbox, Bier said.

Plus, he said, Google’s monopoly power and large ad tech take rates gave the company the ability to cement its strength in other areas that affect publisher monetization, including search.

Consider the $20 billion Google was found to have paid Apple in 2022 to be the default search service for iOS users and Safari browsers: That capital “came from the pocketbooks of marketers and from publishers who suffered by not getting the revenue that they should have gotten,” Bier said.

What now?

For all the optimism and sense of gleeful vindication for many in the industry, any actual antitrust remedies will be a long time coming, said Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics.

For example, the DOJ’s search antitrust trial against Google is entering the remedies phase this week, some eight months after that monopoly case was concluded in August. This case, likewise, could be almost a year removed from finding out what remedies are even being pursued in the ad tech antitrust case, let alone a decision.

Then there would be an appeal. Google has already announced it will appeal against last week’s decision, in addition to the decision in the search antitrust trial. Those appeals can stretch for a year or more.

And Google might win a reversal.

According to Albrecht, the ruling could be vulnerable on appeal, based on recent Supreme Court precedent in antitrust cases that requires proof of harm on both sides of a two-sided marketplace.

In other words, don’t hold your breath waiting for any immediate changes.

For now, though, optimism reigns.

“The real test is whether regulators will follow through with the proposed remedies that unbundle [Google’s] power,” said Eric Shiffman, VP of product marketing at the SSP Yieldmo. But, he said, the courts have a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset the open web, and hopefully rebuild it on fairness, transparency and quality.”