The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has recommended that Google offload two of its major advertising products, AdX and DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), to dismantle what it calls an illegal monopoly in the digital advertising industry.
This follows a federal court’s recent decision, where Google was found guilty of deliberately using its market power to shut out competition in online advertising. Now, the DOJ wants more than accountability, it wants structural change.
According to the newly filed document, the DOJ is not just pushing for asset sales. It wants Google out of the ad exchange business entirely for a decade after the AdX sale.
That’s an aggressive timeline, stressing how seriously U.S. regulators are taking this case. The department argues that AdX and DFP weren’t just Google ads products, but were the backbone of a system Google used to take over the market and restrict rivals.
In the DOJ’s own words: “This comprehensive set of remedies—including divestiture of Google’s unlawfully obtained monopolies and the products that were the principal instruments of Google’s illegal scheme—is necessary to terminate Google’s monopolies, deny Google the fruits of its violations, reintroduce competition into the ad exchange and publisher ad server markets, and guard against reoccurrence in the future.”
The plan doesn’t end with asset sales. The DOJ wants to dismantle Google’s hold on the infrastructure of online ads by forcing its ad buying tools—like AdWords—to interact fairly with all third-party systems.
That includes making them interoperable “on non-discriminatory terms with respect to bidding, matching, placement of ads, or provision of information, except at the express instruction of an advertiser.”
Behind this case is an accusation that Google made sure publishers lost money if they didn’t use AdX. That’s not a business strategy—it’s market strangulation. By tightly integrating the ads products, AdX with DFP, the DOJ says Google locked in websites and starved out alternatives.
Google has not taken this lightly. In its response, the company’s Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, rejected the DOJ’s expanded demands.
“The DOJ conceded Google’s proposed ad tech remedy fully addresses the Court’s decision on liability. The DOJ’s additional proposals to force a divestiture of our ad tech tools go well beyond the Court’s findings, have no basis in law, and would harm publishers and advertisers,” she stated.
Google is instead offering a softer set of solutions: making real-time AdX bids accessible to third-party ad servers and submitting to oversight from an independent compliance monitor—for three years. But to the DOJ, these gestures fall short.
This antitrust fight is only one front. In another case, U.S. regulators are pressing Google to sell off its Chrome browser, following a court ruling that confirmed the company’s monopoly in online search.
The U.S. government is not simply interested in fines or restrictions, it wants to break Google’s monopoly by pulling the system apart, piece by piece.
Whether that happens will depend on the court’s final ruling on the proposed remedies.
