For years, Google built something much bigger than a search engine.
It also built a good part of the machinery on which digital advertising works: tools for advertisers, systems for publishers and AdX, one of the markets where advertising spaces are bought and sold in real time.
In 2023, the United States Department of Justice demandó a Google por monopolizar tecnologías clave de publicidad digital. The accusation was delicate: Google participated not only in the market, but in several points of the same chain.
One side sells advertising.
Someone else buys it.
And in the middle there is an auction that decides who wins, how much they pay and who keeps a portion of the money.
Google had a presence in all those places.
Justice found a monopoly
In April 2025, a federal judge determined that Google had mantenido ilegalmente monopolios en partes importantes del ecosistema ad tech.
The debate over digital advertising matters to businesses that rely on intermediaries to buy and measure ads.
The following debate was inevitable: what do you do when you discover that too important a piece of the Internet is too concentrated in a single company?
The Justice Department wanted a strong solution: force Google to sell AdX.
But this September 2, 2026 the decision came.
Google no tendrá que vender AdX.
Competition in digital advertising shapes pricing, data access and advertiser choice.
Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the breakup and opted for behavioral measures. The machinery is still practically assembled.
The problem is that we are all connected to the machine
For a small business, buying advertising seems simple: you choose an audience, put in a budget, and launch a campaign.
Behind it there are publishers, ad servers, exchanges, algorithms, auctions, data and platforms making decisions in milliseconds.
In digital advertising, legal findings must be distinguished from their eventual commercial consequences.
This ecosystem drives a huge part of the Internet economy.
And there the contradiction appears.
Breaking up such an integrated infrastructure could introduce uncertainty and affect businesses that depend on it. But keeping it focused means accepting that one company continues to have an extraordinarily powerful position over the rules, infrastructure and money that circulates within the market.
That is the delicate ecosystem in which we live.
The Internet appears decentralized from the outside.
Inside, a good part of its economy depends on very few hands.
For those of us who work in marketing this matters because we don’t just use platforms: we build businesses on top of them.
We buy ads there. We measure there. We create audiences there. We adjust budgets according to algorithms that we do not control and we accept rules that can change from one day to the next.
Organizations buying digital advertising should understand where costs and responsibilities sit in the technology chain.
That is why understanding the infrastructure behind advertising is no longer a technical matter.
It’s strategy.
And it’s also a good reason not to build an entire operation depending on a single platform.
If you want to better understand when it makes sense to rely on Google and when to diversify, you can also read our guide on Meta Ads vs Google Ads.
Digital advertising works because there is a huge machinery behind it. The real problem begins when almost all of us depend on the same machine.