On the Brink-ema of the Break Up: Google’s ad tech empire shows why monopoly power cannot be solved by behavioural promises alone
This weekend marks one year since the European Commission fined €2.95bn for abusing its dominance in advertising technology and ordered the company both to stop favouring its own exchange and to end the conflicts of interest running through its adtech business.
One year on, nothing structural changed. Google still acts as buyer, seller and marketplace in the same auction, and still competes with businesses that have no choice but to use it. Google sets the rules of the auction, takes a cut of it, and bids on it. It is a market structure that gives Google the power and incentive to extract value from everyone else.
The European Commission gave Google 60 days to set out how it would comply with the decision. Google came back offering to change its behaviour and nothing else. The Commission has been assessing that offer ever since.
This week, a US court accepted that same offer. Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia rejected the Justice Department’s demand that Google sell parts of its ad tech business and accepted behavioural remedies instead, sixteen months after finding that Google had unlawfully monopolised the market for publisher and ad servers and ad exchanges. Her reasoning is under seal. Nobody outside the case knows yet what Google actually has to do.
Behavioural remedies allow Google to remain in charge of the conflicts of interest from which it profits. Google keeps everything it owns, and regulators spend the next decade chasing workarounds. The European Commission reached a blunter conclusion in its own decision, which is that the only way for Google to end the conflict of interest is a structural remedy, and a break-up of its business would be necessary and proportionate.
That’s why this week, together with People vs Big Tech, LobbyControl, Rebalance Now and WeMove Europe, Balanced Economy Project is publishing exclusive new analysis obtained via the Media and Journalism Research Centre, estimating Google’s EU revenue since the Commission’s ad tech decision. Based on Google’s own EU corporate filings for 2024, we estimate that Google earns approximately €288 million per day, or around €2 billion every week, from EU users, advertisers and publishers.
These figures demonstrate the sheer scale of Google's dominance.
Some argue that ad tech is a shrinking, low-margin corner of the Google empire and not worth the enforcement effort. Jason Kint of Digital Context Next has answered that. “The value to Google was never just its publisher display ad revenue line but the data underneath it — the market-wide visibility Google gained by owning every side of the auction, which it then feeds back into dominance everywhere else.”
Regulators should stop treating separation as a last resort. When a company has been found to have broken the law, and the source of its power is its grip on several layers of the same market, then those layers should be pulled apart. Washington has just declined to do that. The Commission reached the opposite conclusion in its own decision, and it should act on it.
Breaking up Google's ad business is not impossible. The court could have ordered Ad Manager sold off as a business in its own right, with Google's own ad demand made to bid into rival exchanges. The US government broke up AT&T in 1984, and Brussels has secured the same kind of separation from energy companies that owned both the pipes and the supply. But instead, Google was told by the US court to behave better and still owns both ends of the market.
Google is not 'too big to break up'. No company should be allowed to become so deeply embedded in a market that its size becomes an argument for protecting its power.
Claire Godfrey, Executive Director of Balanced Economy Project, said:
" “A year ago, the European Commission found that Google had broken the law and said plainly that only a structural remedy would end the conflict of interest at the heart of its ad business. Google’s answer was to offer more promises. ”
“The Commission does not need more evidence, and a ruling in Virginia does not change what it found in Brussels. It needs to finish what it started and order Google to sell its adtech business.”