Judge Amit Mehta’s verdict last year that Google is running a search monopoly could have merited any number of harsh punishments, such as selling off Chrome or spinning off Android. But those more extreme proposals did not come to pass.
On Tuesday, when the remedies phase of the search trial concluded, Judge Mehta ordered that Google share search data with competitors and barred it from striking exclusivity agreements with hardware providers, like Apple, to make its search engine the default for its products. We break down the ad tech community’s reactions to the orders on this week’s podcast.
And the remedies phase for Google’s second antitrust case – for its monopolistic sell-side ad tech business – starts in just a few weeks. Similar to the search case, one of the Department of Justice’s proposals is a spinoff of Google’s ad tech business. But is that too big of an ask after the smaller concessions in the search case? Time will tell.
GAMing around
Then, five years after most SSPs developed direct-to-agency businesses, Google Ad Manager is apparently courting agencies with a product that will enable them to buy direct.
But there’s one hitch. Google already has a DSP that buyers use. The head-scratching announcement intrigued the ad tech community, which sees Google as running its businesses more independently from each other than it has in the past. Couldn’t such a move signal that Google is preparing for a potential spinoff of its ad tech business, which is undergoing a slow, managed decline during each Alphabet quarterly earnings report?
Our senior editor, Anthony Vargas, shares the interpretations he’s heard of the news, which makes the most sense if Google is creating a more formal separation between its DSP and SSP businesses.
