Judge Orders Data Sharing and Other Fixes to Solve Google’s Ad Tech Monopoly

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia unsealed a ruling that Google must allow its ad technology to work with rival products and share more data with customers to weaken the company’s dominance in online marketing, effectively ensuring that the tech titan’s business will continue largely unscathed. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema found that Google broke the law to protect its control over technology that places ads on pages across the web. Earlier in September, the judge said she had decided against ordering Google to divest part of its ad tech business, something the Justice Department had demanded. But the details of her order had remained under seal. The opinion ordered Google to make its products interoperable with rivals. The company must also share data about its ad auctions with publishers, a group of customers that run websites and use the technology to sell ad space. It must also appoint an internal monitor to track its compliance with the ruling. Measures to break up Google’s ad tech business were “neither realistic nor needed,” Judge Brinkema added in her 106-page opinion. Judge Brinkema acknowledged in her order that A.I. had not yet changed the ad tech industry in the way it has disrupted the search business. But she said that the lengthy timeline to break up the company risked being outpaced by changes, including “imminent industry disruptions caused by A.I.”