If Google hoped that the second Trump administration would offer it a reprieve from the crushing antitrust blow delivered by Biden’s Department of Justice last year, it must now be feeling pretty disappointed.
Rather than deliver a genteel smack on the wrist, it instead proposed one of Google’s worst possible outcomes. In order to chip away at Google’s monopoly on search, the Department of Justice has recommended that Google divest its Chrome browser—and potentially the Android operating system, which today powers the majority of smartphones—as well as end its $20 billion deal with Apple to remain the default browser on the iPhone.
In mid-April, Trump’s Department of Justice ruled against Google yet again, this time regarding its advertising business. In a 115-page ruling, judge Leonie Brinkema wrote that Google had unlawfully built a monopoly on the adtech ecosystem, which had, in turn, harmed choice and prices.
The ruling—which was hailed by attorney general Pam Bondi as a “landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square”—was another courtroom defeat for the tech giant, and the impact will be similarly damaging: The Justice Department has already asked for an order that would compel Google to sell or dispose of parts of its adtech business.
It’s worth considering what this means for the advertising industry in the long run. Google has had an outright dominance in search advertising; in 2023, it consumed 39% of all global digital advertising spend. This would not be possible if not for Google’s roughly 90% share of global search traffic.
Logically, if Google’s search engine market share goes down, so too will its stranglehold on the digital advertising ecosystem. It will be the start of a brave new world, creating new opportunities for advertisers and adtech at large, with competition providing better value and greater innovation. The only sad part is that it won’t happen overnight.
Set your expectations
Before you start building a Bing strategy and a DuckDuckGo strategy, there are two points worth mentioning.