Dismantling Google Will Not Fix the Adtech Ecosystem

After months of anticipation, when Google’s verdict was finally announced, the tech giant was found to be in violation of antitrust law. This was a surprise to almost no one.

We have to wait for the judge to rule on remedies, and also wait for appeals and other parts of the legal process to be completed. Net-net, it’s going to take a while before anything happens (unless Google takes some action on its own that satisfies the judge).

But it’s worth imagining what the future might look like. If we assume that Google also loses its appeals, and the judge puts some sort of remedies in place, how might the digital advertising world change in the future?

We don’t know what the remedies will be, but we do know some things the Department of Justice has proposed. To keep this simple, let’s stick purely to things related directly to advertising, even though the judge’s remedies could go beyond ads. Let’s assume three things happen:

1. Google is forced to divest of Google Ad Manager (GAM) and its ad exchange, AdX. Let’s also assume that these are spun off into a separate company.
2. The GAM/AdX spinoff is forced to make AdX available to publishers outside GAM. Most web publishers use Prebid as the primary source of programmatic revenue, so AdX would need to build a Prebid adapter like all other SSPs on the market.
3. Google is forced to continue sending programmatic demand to the web at the same rate it does today. One risk is that Google stops its DV360 and Google Ads platforms from bidding on the open web, so a remedy needs to consider this; AdX without DV360 and Google Ads demand is a weak SSP.

Lots more could happen, but this is a good starting point for imagining the future. 

April 2, 2029. On this completely made-up date, these three things occur. Immediately, most publishers will install the AdX Prebid adapter. This will give them a second path to AdX demand (in addition to going through GAM) and will be a slight net positive for publisher revenue.

Additionally, some savvy programmatic-only publishers will likely drop GAM for a much simpler ad server. They’ll still want AdX demand, but since they can get it through Prebid, the revenue impact of turning off GAM will be small.