Google Ordered to Revamp Advertising Empire After Antitrust Ruling

A federal judge has ordered Google to make significant changes to its advertising empire, but stopped short of breaking up the company. The ruling comes after a landmark antitrust trial, which found Google liable for illegally monopolizing certain online ad markets.

The key takeaway is that Google cannot give its own services preferential treatment in auctions for ads on websites across the open internet. This means it can't force publishers using its DFP ad server to also use its AdX exchange, or use auction mechanisms that give AdX an advantage over rivals.

Google must also integrate its exchange and publisher ad server with Prebid, a widely used open-source technology that lets publishers invite multiple ad exchanges to bid for their ad space using a technique called header bidding. This should help rival exchanges compete more fairly with AdX.