Judge Leonie Brinkema

On Monday, PubMatic became the second sell-side platform to file a follow-on antitrust lawsuit against Google.

Google’s search antitrust trial ends with a whimper; the pitfalls of agency-owned SSPs; Perplexity axes its ads business; and brands are still building big-ticket metaverse experiences.

Last week, the DOJ and Google filed their respective witness lists and the exhibit lists for the remedy phase of the ad tech antitrust trial. Lots of familiar faces!

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.

The programmatic “sustainability” and “waste” conversation has shifted. Plus, the 2010s called – they want Facebook back.

Monday was a busy day for antitrust attorneys in Washington, DC: It marked Day One of the the remedies phase of the Google search trial and the start of the second week of FTC v. Meta.

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.

More competition between SSPs and ad servers should be a boon for publishers in the long term. But publishers will feel some growing pains if there is a sudden disruption in Google’s ad payouts or if their ad server fees increase.

There’s a decision! On Thursday, Judge Leonie Brinkema published her long-awaited ruling in US v. Google, finding Google guilty of having monopolized two online advertising markets.

During CES, Comcast debuted a plan to expand its reach among small business and regional advertisers with a new offering called Universal Ads.