DOJ

Court is back in session. And the fate of  the open internet is in the balance.

The Google trial remedy phase is about to begin; not all of YouTube’s AI plans are hitting; and The Trade Desk’s Kokai pitch decks leave something to be desired.

Judge Mehta defends his light touch in addressing Google’s search monopoly; the de minimis exemption for imports is over, and it could ding Q4 ad spend; and a whistleblower says Meta ignored WhatsApp’s privacy lapses.

Late Friday evening, Google filed its proposed remedies to its ad tech monopoly to District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema, and unsurprisingly, they’re rather mild – and very different from what the Department of Justice is looking for.

Remedies in the federal search antitrust case against Google landed with a thud earlier this week. Most publishers and ad industry pundits were sorely disappointed.

We’ve got the witness list for the remedy phase of the Google antitrust trial, which starts in September. How might Google be forced to change its ad server and exchange to make this corner of the ad tech market competitive again?

The DOJ is proposing that Google should give rival ad exchanges and ad servers real-time access to bidding data from AdX – and Google agrees.

If the court ultimately orders Google to spin off AdX or DFP, the result would be a fundamental rebalancing of power across the digital advertising supply chain. For marketers, the implications are just as significant.

Rival browsers raise an objection to Google being forced to sell Chrome; ad agencies pivot to software and services; and people are turning to chatbots instead of search, with error-filled results.

Black Friday ecommerce continues to surge, mainly on mobile; social platforms pull optimization features for health and beauty brands; and Google’s antitrust lawyers subpoena info about rival AI search startups.