Googlers are laughing at you. Can you blame them?
Opinion
Advertisers should be dismayed. Instead, Google’s victory in court proves how deeply our industry has normalised monopoly.
It’s one thing to get ripped off. It’s another to be laughed at while it happens.
That’s what happened last week when a US judge handed Google a huge victory. Inside the company, employees celebrated with Lord of the Rings and The Wolf of Wall Street memes.
“Looks like Chrome is back on the menu, boys,” crowed one. Another pasted Chrome’s logo over Leonardo DiCaprio, roaring “I’m not ******* leaving.” Others joked about the stock price surge, lighting digital candles for colleagues who sold too soon.
That revelation was made nearly a week ago and Google has still not commented. Plenty of opportunity to show humility or explain how these gloating goons don’t represent the views of the company.
But why bother? Google is too big to pretend to care and its employees know it.
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Why the US loves monopoly
They were popping Champagne because Google got the slap on the wrist it asked for. Holding company Alphabet’s stock surged to an all-time high of just over $231 by Friday.
Because Chrome, the jewel in Google’s data crown, is now safe. The $20bn a year Google pays Apple to be Safari’s default search engine will keep flowing.
It wasn’t a wipeout victory: the court banned exclusive contracts, ordered Google to share some search data with rivals and forced it to open up syndication services. But the judge threw out the big remedies: no Chrome spin-off, no Android divestiture, no ban on paying for defaults.
And it’s exactly the kind of decision we’ve come to expect from the US, where antitrust law has been hollowed out over the last 50 years. In his powerful account of the private equity industry, former federal prosecutor Brendan Ballou described this as “a sustained assault for two generations”.
Regulators can barely stop corporate roll-ups, let alone unwind Big Tech.
In Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, Ballou singled out supreme court justice Antonin Scalia as a major culprit. Scalia said the quiet part out loud in a landmark 2004 decision that enabled Verizon to impede market access to rivals.
According to Scalia, monopoly is “an important element of the free market system” and charging monopoly prices is what rewards “business acumen” and drives growth.
In other words, US judges now defend the very behaviour they once policed.
Which is why the US has four airlines that control three-quarters of the sector. Three mobile networks. Two giant pharmacy chains. Meatpacking, rail freight, credit cards, cloud computing… all dominated by a handful of players.
So when judge Amit Mehta calls it “overreach” to suggest spinning off Chrome or Android, he’s merely following the orthodoxy: structural remedies are dead. The best you’ll get is data-sharing requirements that lawyers will spend years litigating into mush.
And then you get mocked by employees who know the system has their back.
Pay up or shut up
Advocacy group Movement for an Open Web has called this a “historic failure”.
Its point was simple: forcing Google to share data won’t change the fundamentals when the company can still buy its way into every default. If Apple and the telcos are pocketing billions, they have no incentive to compete.
And don’t look to Europe for help. Brussels has paused its own adtech fine against Google, reportedly to avoid retaliation from Donald Trump’s administration, which had Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai as a guest of honour at the gangsterish presidential inauguration this year. Even geopolitics is now bending to keep the monopoly machine safe.
For our industry, that’s the sting. Google sponsors marketing events and activities. Meanwhile, cost-per-click inflation marches upwards even in categories where consumer demand is flat. Auction rules are black boxes that nobody outside Mountain View can interrogate.
Cookie deprecation had been delayed so many times that it became a punchline. And how convenient that the delays kept everyone dependent on Google’s targeting data while rivals burn millions on workarounds!
And when you want clean cross-media measurement? You pay Google for the privilege, using Google’s numbers, on Google’s terms.
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Don’t expect much from AI
The message to challengers is clear: don’t bother.
The US justice department’s adtech case laid it bare: Google ran the ad exchange and the ad server simultaneously, like a casino spinning the roulette wheel and betting against the punters.
No wonder advertisers complain of higher costs and murky performance, while publishers see shrinking revenue shares.
And when rivals try to build alternatives, they die. Neeva, the ad-free search startup, shut down in 2023 and sold itself to Snowflake. Microsoft’s Bing is throwing billions at OpenAI and still barely dents Google’s share. Even with generative AI shaking the landscape, Mehta explicitly said Google can keep paying for defaults.
That innovation death spiral isn’t just bad for Silicon Valley. It’s bad for us. It means no new ad formats, no real privacy-first search, no alternative pricing models. It means we’re stuck with whatever Google feels like giving us (and paying ever more for the privilege).
And then there’s credibility. Why would the brightest graduates choose advertising when its agencies continue to be crushed by tech monopolies? Why build a career in media when accountancy, banking or consulting offers more money, more prestige and less hypocrisy?
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The rot is widespread
So, from the comfort of their plush offices, Googlers will keep laughing at you.
Laughing at the poor fools in advertising who pay monopoly rents and laughing at the media agencies whose negotiating power dwindles each month.
But we’re just one of many business sectors that are being held back because our politicians and judges have forgotten that competition drives innovation, productivity and growth.
Our economy is in dire need of a jump start and being riddled with bloated and anti-competitive conglomerates is exactly what we don’t need right now.
Or to put this in language that Googlers would understand:
Omar Oakes was founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years and was previously media and tech editor of Campaign. His column on The Media Leader was nominated for the BSME’s B2B Column of the Year in 2024.