Google’s obligations in the DOJ ad tech case came into view September 16, when Judge Leonie Brinkema’s 106-page remedies opinion was unsealed after she declined to order a breakup. The company can no longer tie DFP to AdX or rebuild that tie by other means, and it can’t apply First Look, Last Look, or Unified Pricing Rules to indirect transactions, which lets publishers set different floors on different exchanges. Dropping the pricing rules by itself would pull AdX’s 20% take rate down to roughly 16.6%, according to the plaintiffs’ own expert. Google also has to let Prebid pull real-time AdX bids on indirect open-web display inventory and give rival ad servers those bids on DFP’s terms, all of it watched by a court-appointed Monitor with access to its source code for six years.
