Google ordered to let rivals into its ad-tech walled garden

Google gets to keep its ad-tech business. It just has to make considerably more of it work with everyone else.

A newly unsealed remedies ruling in the US Justice Department’s antitrust case requires Google to build integrations between AdX, DFP and Prebid, while also allowing AdX to send real-time bids into competing publisher ad servers.

For publishers, that is the part worth paying attention to.

Google currently combines its publisher ad server, commonly known as DFP, and the AdX advertising exchange inside Google Ad Manager. Prebid, meanwhile, is the widely used open-source framework behind much of header bidding.

The court essentially wants those systems to stop behaving like separate plumbing networks.

Google has to connect the pipes

Under the remedies, Google must create and support integrations between:

• AdX and Prebid
• DFP and Prebid
• AdX and competing publisher ad servers

That last part matters.

A publisher using another ad server should be able to receive real-time bids from AdX without also having to use Google’s publisher ad server.

The Justice Department described the change as giving publishers access to AdX demand without forcing them to use both sides of Google’s stack.

Google must also make it easier for publishers to export data from DFP and AdX, including information that could help them move to another provider.

In other words, the walled garden can stay. It just needs more gates.

Google also loses some home-field advantage

The ruling goes beyond APIs.

Google’s AdWords demand will no longer be allowed to receive preferential treatment simply because it is bidding through Google’s own ad-tech products.

AdWords also cannot bid directly into DFP under the remedies.

That addresses one of the central problems in the case: Google operating several important parts of the advertising auction while those parts had unusually good access to each other.

Google does not have to sell AdX, which was the more drastic remedy sought by the Justice Department. The court instead decided that interoperability rules and other behavioral restrictions were sufficient.

Don’t expect the switch to flip tomorrow

There is one fairly large catch.

Publishers are unlikely to see these changes immediately.

Google has around 12 months to open AdX to rival publisher ad servers, while the integrations connecting AdX and DFP with Prebid are expected to take roughly 12 to 15 months, according to the implementation timetable reported by Digiday.

So this is less “Google’s ad stack opens today” and more “Google has been told where to put the doors.”

A technical monitor and committee will oversee Google’s compliance for six years.

Whether publishers actually switch ad servers, gain more bargaining power or make more money as a result is another question.

The ruling does not guarantee any of those things.

What it does change is something much more basic: publishers should eventually be able to reach important Google advertising demand without needing quite so much Google machinery surrounding it.

For an industry that has spent years talking about Google’s walled garden, that is a fairly literal remedy.