Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Questions on Unpredicted Results From Recent Ad-Tech Court Decisions

Forbes

22-05-2025

What is the right balance when consumers and clients drive decisions?
A lot of schadenfreude has floated around the recent U.S. Justice Department doubling down on accusations about Google's search and ads business. Would the proposed remedies, such as forcing the sale of Chrome, lead to the predicted outcomes—and would those outcomes improve the state of digital?
After all, the close cousin of schadenfreude (aka the delicious joy one feels at other people's misfortune) is, 'Be careful what you wish for….' And that's where things might well be headed for most with this ruling.
In a business like digital where so many of its leaders are so convinced that the only means of judgement is effectiveness and efficiency, it's interesting to watch when competitors who don't get the winning results they are persuaded they so richly deserve turn their traditional form of appreciation for winning at all costs into approbation at the superior performance of others in the marketplace. What were once the only success metrics that mattered are now viewed as 'unfair.' Once ruthless competitors who valued only effective results beg for outside marketplace interventions as they have come to view themselves as victims… If one were cynical, one might wonder, Has the Objectivist hero we know from Ayn Rand become a tender, help-me-I'm-melting snowflake?
In time alone, for starters, the case is ancient in internet years and tragically backward-looking. Turns out, that since the time that the government brought this case in 2023, the world has indeed changed.
To review: After a trial that ended last November but with a decision not coming until just a few weeks ago, in April, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia announced that she had accepted some arguments from the Department of Justice and found Google guilty of operating a monopoly in ad tech. Government lawyers had argued at trial that Google had dominated the technology that delivers ads to websites around the internet using a system that runs an auction for open ad space on a website in real time as pages load.
However, Judge Brinkema didn't accept the entire case as laid out by the DOJ. As Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's VP of regulatory affairs, said in a widely quoted statement: 'We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half. The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don't harm competition. We disagree with the Court's decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.'
Most recently, on May 6, 2025, Judge Brinkema held the first hearings on remedies proposed by the two sides. At that hearing, the DOJ pushed for a breakup of Google's ad tech business, specifically the forced sale of its AdX exchange and DFP ad server among other things. Google instead advocated for allowing competitors real-time bidding access to its ad exchange, arguing that forced divestiture is unnecessary, lacks legal basis and would harm publishers and advertisers.
These opposing remedies have been floating out there for a while, and they are just intermediary considerations for now since Judge Brinkema plans to hear the ad-tech remedies at a trial scheduled for September 22, 2025.
A close look at Google's Network ad tech revenues shows a steady shrinkage in recent reports
In the time it took to bring the case, hear the two sides and render a verdict—let alone get to final specific remedies, which aren't expected until another four months from now—things have continued to change in the ad-tech marketplace.
Just take a look at Google Network's ad tech revenues, which have been intermittently but steadily shrinking. The first quarter of 2025 saw revenues at $7.2 billion, down from $7.9 billion the previous quarter and having dropped from $7.4 billion from one year ago, a decrease of -8.7% from the previous quarter and -2% from the previous year.
Many of those pushing for a Google breakup are those who, unsurprisingly, stand to benefit the most: owners of demand-side platforms, ad servers, and supply-side platforms that directly compete with Google's ad tech, or the publishers who feel their revenues have been reduced by unfair ad auctions. In the former category one might think about major companies like The Trade Desk, Magnite and Roku, at least for the ad tech portion of its revenues.
The global ad tech sector in 2025 is estimated to be between $795 billion and $1.5 trillion depending on who's doing the estimating (exact market definitions and overlaps can vary, with most estimates closer to the first number). If the global market is $795 billion or thereabouts, Google has controlled about 34–35% of the market based on its Q1 earnings numbers. So while Google is the largest player, it's by no means the only one and, according to these figures at least, 65% of the market is owned by other players.
In other words, competition in ad tech had already been seeing others step into and thrive in the marketplace.
Of course, one wonders, who else might really benefit from a Google breakup? One might think about the biggest competitors like Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft which could perhaps gain market share where they play in ad tech—but they, too, could find and have found themselves targets of attention from an activist DOJ and a regulation-curious European Union.
By contrast, there might be a lot more losers. One could predict that brand advertisers will likely find themselves in a more fragmented world, having to stitch together proactively more suppliers with potentially less impact. If Google has to sell its ad exchange or ad server, buying digital ads could get harder, time intensive and more expensive. In a time of uncertainty around tariffs and their effects on pricing and general inflationary trends, consumers could be facing higher prices, reduced integration between services, reduced data security and an inferior, even frustrating user experience. Google itself could get distracted in all this and fall behind in the AI race if it's forced to divert resources.
And if Google is forced to divest Chrome, what does that mean for fair competition against other players in what we called a short while ago 'the browser wars,' like Edge and Safari? Consumers install Chrome because they prefer it, and the same applies to many other Google products like Gmail. The advantage that those other two browsers have: they come preinstalled on devices and if Chrome were to be spun off, they might well find themselves without any serious marketplace competition. Could that be an unintended result that the DOJ hands back to Microsoft, in shades of Internet Explorer in 1995?
In a larger context, there are also questions, which we can't yet see the answers to, but about which we can seriously wonder. Speculation can lead us in many directions. Monopolies by their nature can reduce competition and create pricing distortions. For the last few decades, the internet, and especially the free ad-supported internet, or open web, has on the other hand been nothing short of a modern marketing and financial miracle. No industry has been more efficient than digital advertising. It's contributed trillions to the GDP of the U.S. and the world. Digital ad prices, ad tech fees and search ad prices have consistently fallen, without government interference, and benefiting businesses and consumers. So, what would be the impact of forcing Google to share ad data with commercial rivals and being prohibited from integrating ads into search (as that would arguably 'preference' Google search over competitors)? Disrupting the internet ad ecosystem could cause prices to rise, which would be passed along to consumers.
So, while the recent Google breakup decision has met with some positive responses (see schadenfreude above), with some publishers seeing the potential for them to increase revenues, others are bracing for a decrease in revenue as the solutions work their way through the system (that's the 'careful what you wish for' part).
We don't hear a lot of brands out there calling for these solutions—and they themselves might be the ones that, through fragmentation, face the biggest resulting costs
What we don't hear or see a lot of? Advertisers and brands themselves out there calling for this, talking about how it improves their businesses. Same applies to smaller companies that rely on Google Ad Manager. In fact, brands have been mostly silent. It's the competition in the tech world that is salivating for the potential. What brands face is an even more fragmented and competitive ad-tech landscape, costing them at a minimum more time, with other possible expenses still to be seen, as they make new decisions on which vendors to work with and how. The remedies phase of this ruling coming on September 22 may not include remedies favorable at all for many of the small businesses and brands that rely on the digital ad tech ecosystem for reaching their consumers.
We shall see but that could well cost them—and us all in times of inflation—mightily.