Google should relax ad tech rules, appoint antitrust monitor, US judge finds

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia: A federal judge said Google should relax its rules governing its online advertising auctions and appoint an internal antitrust compliance monitor, though the judge stopped short of demanding that the Alphabet unit break up its advertising technology monopoly.

US District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, gave her assessment in a decision unsealed on Wednesday (Sep 16), two weeks after she rejected the US Department of Justice's insistence that Google break up its business of placing ads across the internet.

The government had wanted Google to sell AdX, where publishers pay a 20 per cent fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites, claiming Google could not be trusted to run it.

Brinkema accepted proposals that Google not require websites that use its ad server to also use its ad exchange, where the company reaps fees in instant auctions that sell space to advertisers. Google would also cease practices that publishers complained kept them locked into Google's ad tech tools.

The remedies "will be sufficient to effectively pry open to competition the ad tech markets that were injured by Google’s unlawful conduct, and prevent Google from reverting to anticompetitive conduct in these markets," Brinkema wrote in her 106-page decision.

Changes must remain in place for six years, not the 15 years sought by the Justice Department and various states that also sued.

Google had no immediate comment. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Brinkema issued her bottom-line decision on September 2, but gave both sides 14 days to seek redactions of confidential information from her written decision.