The Ad Tech Ruling Against Google and the Money Behind Free News Websites

Open a local news site on your phone and, before the headline finishes loading, an auction has already happened. In a fraction of a second, information about the page and about you was sent out, advertisers' software placed bids, a winner was chosen, and an ad was delivered into the empty rectangle beside the story. The newspaper got a cut of the price. Somebody in the middle got the rest. For most of the last fifteen years, that somebody was very often Google, which ran the software the publisher used to sell the space, the exchange where the auction took place and major tools advertisers used to buy it. On April 17, 2025, in a courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google had built and maintained that position illegally.

In short: Judge Leonie Brinkema found in April 2025 that Google unlawfully monopolized the market for publisher ad servers and the market for ad exchanges for open-web display advertising, and illegally tied the two together. Those markets decide how much of every ad dollar reaches the news sites and other publishers that rely on it. How the remedy is shaped will matter to every independent outlet that lives on display advertising.

The plumbing nobody sees

Most people understand advertising as a simple exchange: a business pays a newspaper to run its ad. Online display advertising does not work that way anymore. It runs through a chain of software, and each link takes a fee.

On one side is the publisher, say a regional newspaper's website. It uses an ad server, software that manages its ad space, decides which ads go where, and calls auctions for the space it has not sold directly. Google's publisher ad server, long known as DoubleClick for Publishers and now part of Google Ad Manager, was used by the large majority of significant publishers.

In the middle is the ad exchange, the marketplace where the auction happens. Google's exchange was called AdX.

On the other side are the tools advertisers use to bid, including Google's own buying tools, such as Google Ads, which gives millions of small advertisers a way to buy display ads across the web.

Here is the problem in one sentence: Google owned the leading product at every step, so it was the seller's broker, the buyer's broker and the auction house at the same time. In ordinary finance, that arrangement would be an obvious conflict of interest. In ad tech it was the business model.

How Google built the position

The pieces came together largely through acquisitions. In 2008 Google bought DoubleClick for about $3.1 billion, giving it the dominant publisher ad server. In 2011 it bought AdMeld, another company in the publisher-side business. Google built AdX into the leading exchange and connected it to the demand from its huge base of advertisers.

The government's case at trial focused on how Google then used the links between its products. Publishers who wanted access to the advertising demand flowing through Google's buying tools effectively had to use AdX, and AdX worked best, or in some respects only, with Google's ad server. For years, Google's exchange got special advantages in the auctions run by its own ad server, including a chance to see competing bids before making its own, a practice the industry called "last look."

Publishers fought back with a technique called header bidding, which emerged in the mid-2010s. Code placed on the publisher's web page sent the ad space to several exchanges at once before the ad server made its decision, so rival exchanges could compete on equal footing. Google responded with its own alternative, which competitors and the government argued was designed to keep Google at the centre of the process. In 2019 Google introduced what it called Unified Pricing Rules, which limited publishers' ability to set different minimum prices for different exchanges. Publishers had used those different floors to steer business toward rivals that charged less.

Evidence at trial also showed the size of the cut. Google's exchange typically took a fee of about 20 percent of each transaction, well above what rivals said they could charge in a competitive market.

What Judge Brinkema decided

The Justice Department and a group of states filed the case in January 2023. It went to trial in September 2024, without a jury, before Judge Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia.

Her April 2025 opinion found that Google had monopoly power in two markets: publisher ad servers for open-web display advertising and ad exchanges for open-web display advertising. She found that Google had willfully acquired and maintained monopoly power in those markets, and that it had unlawfully tied its ad server to its exchange. She also found that the conduct harmed publishers, the competitive process and, ultimately, the people who read publishers' websites.

She did not accept every part of the government's case. She rejected the claim that Google had monopolized a market for advertiser ad networks, finding that the government had not proved that market as defined. And she found that the acquisitions of DoubleClick and AdMeld were not themselves proven to be anticompetitive in isolation, although they were part of the story of how Google gained its position.

Remedies were argued separately. The Justice Department asked for Google to be required to sell AdX and to open up the auction logic of its publisher ad server so that rival exchanges could compete on fair terms. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically unworkable and proposed changes to how its products work together instead. A remedies trial took place in September 2025. The current state of that remedy, and any appeal, can be followed on Court Watch and our Big Tech and AI page; I will not guess at an outcome here. Regulators outside the United States reached similar conclusions: in September 2025 the European Commission fined Google nearly 3 billion euros over its ad tech practices.

Why the cut matters to the news

Here is where this stops being a story about software and becomes a story about democracy.

Most news websites are free to read because they are paid for, at least partly, by display ads. When an advertiser spends a dollar to reach readers of a local paper's site, the paper gets whatever is left after every link in the chain has taken its fee. If one company controls several links and faces no real competition at any of them, it can take a larger share without losing customers. Every point of margin it captures is money that does not pay for a reporter.

That is not the only reason local news has collapsed. Classified advertising moved to free online listings, readers moved to social media, and private equity firms bought chains and cut newsrooms to the bone. Since the mid-2000s the United States has lost a large share of its newspapers and an even larger share of its newspaper journalists, and many counties now have no local news outlet at all. The ad tech case does not explain all of that, and it is worth being careful not to claim it does. But it explains one channel through which the value of journalism was drained toward the middlemen.

There is also a power problem beyond the money. When the auction house and both brokers are the same company, publishers cannot see clearly what advertisers paid or why. They cannot easily compare one exchange with another. That opacity weakens publishers' ability to negotiate, and it makes it harder for anyone, including regulators, to understand where the money goes.

The other side, fairly stated

Google's defence deserves a fair hearing.

First, Google argued that integration is efficient. Products that work together smoothly reduce costs and fraud, and publishers chose Google's tools because they were good and reliable. Many small publishers have no staff to manage complex ad technology, and an integrated system meant they could earn money from ads with little effort.

Second, Google argued that the market is broader than the government said. Advertisers spend most of their digital budgets on social media, search, streaming and retail sites, not on display ads on the open web. If advertisers can easily shift money to those channels, Google's power over open-web display advertising is constrained.

Third, Google pointed out that ad tech prices have fallen over time and that some of the features the government attacked were responses to fraud and to the risk of advertisers being shown in harmful contexts.

These are not empty arguments. The question of market definition, whether open-web display advertising is a market of its own, was the central battle in the case. But I find the judge's answer persuasive. For a publisher selling its own ad space, there is no substitute for an ad server and an exchange. A local paper cannot sell its inventory on Instagram. The fact that advertisers have other channels does not help a publisher that needs a fair price for its own pages.

What a good remedy looks like

The structural case is strong here, and stronger than in the search case, because the conflict of interest is so direct. A company that runs the exchange should not also run the publisher's ad server and the buyer's tools, any more than one firm should own a stock exchange and act as both broker and buyer for the trades on it. Separating AdX from the ad server would remove the incentive to tilt auctions.

Behavioral rules could help too: requiring that rival exchanges get the same access to Google's ad server, ending special auction privileges, and giving publishers full data about their own auctions. But behavioral rules depend on enforcement for years, and the history of conduct remedies in technology cases suggests they erode.

Beyond the courts, Congress has considered bills to separate the buy side, sell side and exchange functions for large ad tech companies. Versions have drawn sponsors from both parties, which is a reminder that the plight of local news is not a partisan concern. A small-town paper in a deep-red county and a nonprofit newsroom in a blue city face the same middlemen.

One auction, step by step

It helps to slow the process down. What follows is a simplified example, not a description of any particular company's system, but it shows where the money goes.

A reader in a small city opens a story about a water main break on the local paper's website. The page has an empty ad slot. The paper's ad server notices the slot and checks whether the paper has already sold it directly, say to a car dealership that bought a month of ads on the home page. It has not.

So the ad server offers the slot for auction. It sends a request to one or more exchanges with information about the page and, depending on the reader's privacy settings and the law where they live, some information about the reader. Each exchange passes the request to buying tools used by advertisers. Those tools decide, in milliseconds, whether the reader is worth showing an ad to and how much to bid.

The bids come back. The exchange picks a winner and sets a price. The ad server compares that result with any other options it has and chooses what to show. The ad loads. Then the money flows backward: the advertiser pays its buying tool, the buying tool pays the exchange, the exchange pays the publisher, and each takes its fee along the way. The publisher ends up with what is left.

Now imagine that the ad server, the exchange and one of the biggest buying tools all belong to the same company. The company decides how the ad server ranks bids, which exchanges it calls first, what information each one sees, and what fee it takes at each step. A publisher that wants to know whether it got a fair price has to trust the company that set the rules, ran the auction and bid in it. That is the arrangement Judge Brinkema found unlawful, and it is why the remedy question is about structure and not only about fees.

The process also changed over time in ways that affected publishers. Google moved its ad manager to a unified first-price auction in 2019, replacing the older second-price model, and folded new pricing rules into that change. Each shift in auction design moves money among advertisers, publishers and intermediaries. Publishers rarely have the leverage to say no.

What you can do

The money behind free news is being decided by judges, regulators and lawmakers. Ways to weigh in:

• Tell your members of Congress that ad tech competition is a local news issue. Find your representative and senators by entering your address, with their phone numbers, contact forms and recent votes, and ask whether they would support separating the parts of the ad tech chain.
• Support local journalism directly. Paying for a subscription or giving to a nonprofit newsroom puts money where middlemen cannot take a cut. The nonprofit directory lists organizations by cause in every state.
• Read the coverage of the media economy. Our page on media and democracy gathers reporting on newsrooms, ownership and the platforms that shape them.

The rectangle beside the story is small. The auction behind it decides whether there is anyone left to write the story.