Sources: the US DOJ is preparing to sue Google over its ad market business as soon as September, as the DOJ's antitrust division lawyers interview publishers
their dominance in digital advertising. We'd love to see it happen, and here's why. 🧵 https://www.bloomberg.com/... Kontra / @counternotions : From all that I read in trade pubs, I thought Apple is the dominant abuser in the online ad business. https://www.bloomberg.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This filing has been two years in the making: the DOJ's ad-market probe dates back to at least 2020, when sources detailed investigators' focus on how Google bundles its ad tools in potentially anticompetitive ways (bundling concerns), and by July 2022 the DOJ had signaled it would reject Alphabet's proposed concessions rather than settle (rejecting the concessions). Interviewing publishers now is the evidentiary endgame before a complaint — the people who pay Google a cut to broker their ads are the direct witnesses to how the stack squeezes them.
First-order effects
- Publishers are pulled directly into the case as interviewed sources, their revenue-split experiences with Google becoming core evidence for the DOJ's complaint expected as soon as September.
- Google shifts from negotiating concessions to litigating, facing a formal antitrust suit over its ad market business as the centerpiece of the DOJ's campaign against it.
Second-order effects
- State attorneys general are positioned to join the federal action, multiplying the legal pressure on Google's ad tech unit much as they did when the DOJ ultimately sued alongside California and seven other states.
- If the case lands, the parties paying Google brokerage cuts — news organizations, and per later reporting Meta and Amazon — emerge as the clearest commercial beneficiaries of a weakened Google ad stack.
Third-order effects
- A suit seeking structural remedies points toward an ad tech market no longer organized around one vertically integrated intermediary owning the buy side, sell side, and exchange — with the DOJ willing to pursue breakups rather than behavioral fixes.
- As the fifth major US case challenging Google's practices, this cements a regulatory posture where each business line gets its own antitrust front rather than a single consolidated settlement.
The trend: US antitrust enforcement against Google is moving from negotiated concessions toward structural litigation, with the ad tech stack as the next domino after search.