The biggest issue that hangs over all of this is the search antitrust case. If the judges and DOJ decide to consider both cases together and create remedies that span the issues, this could lead to much larger changes that could totally disrupt the dynamics of the market. While publisher adtech has undoubtedly been a challenging market, many of the issues publishers face today go far beyond that market. A more unified set of remedies creates much more opportunities to level the playing field in the future. 

All of this is to say that while it may be true Google took anticompetitive actions to achieve its dominant market position in publisher adtech, reversing those actions will not simply improve the overall market. Perhaps most importantly, the issues specific to the adtech market today are unrelated to the future issues that Google could cause for web publishers, which are almost entirely about the traffic that Google sends to websites. But that’s a story for another day.