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DOJ lists ‘innumerable’ ways Google could maintain an ad tech monopoly

A claw machine claw pulling a cursor out of a ball pit filled with red, yellow, blue and green balls.
Illustration by Robyn Phelps / Shutterstock / The Current

The U.S. Department of Justice is making it explicitly clear that it believes behavioral remedies won’t stifle Google’s ad tech monopoly.

In a post-trial brief submitted on Nov. 3, the DOJ wrote that “only structural relief will stop Google from exploiting new roads to monopoly.”

In other words, the DOJ is urging that Judge Leonie M. Brinkema align with its proposed final remedies, also submitted on Monday, which would essentially break up Google’s ad tech business.

The DOJ’s proposed remedies include, in part, the divestiture of Google’s ad exchange, AdX; to “separate and provide via an open-source license DFP’s [DoubleClick for Publishers, Google’s publisher ad server] Final Auction Logic”; and, if determined necessary, to divest what’s left of DFP and require Google to “refrain from reentering the market for Open-Web Display Publisher Ad Servers during the supervision period.”

This follows Brinkema’s April ruling that Google illegally maintained a monopoly over the open-web display publisher ad server market and the open-web display ad exchange market.

Further, the DOJ listed the “innumerable ways Google could modify its technology” to maintain its monopoly in other ways if its ad tech business remains intact. They include:

  • “Modifying the latency of bids,” so that bids from Google tools travel faster than others
  • “Changing how data signals are communicated”
  • Giving artificial advantages to some Google tools by “modifying decision algorithms”
  • Making header-bidding and other non-Google pathways more expensive
  • Recreating the “coercive effects” of the AdX-DFP tie by creating “an exclusive or semi-exclusive buying relationship” between AdWords and DFP
  • Passing fewer transaction types to non-Google publisher ad servers
  • Limiting or throttling bids from AdX to rival publisher ad servers

For Google’s part, it also submitted its final proposals this week.

It proposed giving Google Ad Manager Publisher customers “the choice to access Real Time Bids from AdX for Qualifying Open Web Display Inventory without being required to call AdX directly from DFP.”

Google proposed that it be prohibited from enforcing “any policies or contract terms that restrict the sharing of Real Time Bids for Qualifying Open Web Display Inventory from AdX with a non-Google Qualified Publisher Ad Server.”

It also proposed deprecating and not reimplementing unified pricing rules in DFP, along with more behavioral remedies.

Closing arguments in the Google ad tech remedies case are set for Nov. 17.