Brinkema leaves Brussels alone in asking Google to sell part of its ad stack

If you run a publisher's ad stack, there is a fair chance a planning document you wrote last year contains a line that reads "pending the remedy". That line is now a conduct question. Google's buy-side tools and its sell-side tools sit at either end of an exchange it also owns, a single global system whose largest advertisers and publishers do not stop at the EU border ^[6]. That is the mechanical reason a Brussels-only carve-out was always awkward, and Politico's Jacob Parry reports the US ruling now leaves the Commission isolated in pressing for one ^[4].

Anthony Whelan, director general of DG Competition, told a conference in Florence that structural remedies are "of course very difficult and can be politically contested" where parties have already completed investment activities, and that this is a hard case irrespective of transatlantic relations ^[7]. thenextweb reads that as notably softer than the Commission's position last September, and notes that the US ruling removed the parallel proceeding Brussels had been able to point to ^[8]. The Trump administration's repeated tariff threats over EU actions against American companies sit in the same room ^[17].

The cost of assessing is not symmetric. The Commission gave itself an extension in March and is still reading the plan ^[12]. A coalition including People vs Big Tech, LobbyControl and the Balanced Economy Project puts Google's EU revenues at EUR 288m a day since the ruling, drawn from filings in 19 member states compiled by the Media and Journalism Research Center, though that figure covers the whole EU business rather than advertising ^[14]. Take it at face value and the EUR 2.95bn fine is about ten days of it, since 2,950 divided by 288 is 10.2 ^[18], with a full year running to roughly EUR 105bn ^[19].

What ad ops teams have been telling themselves is that a breakup would reset the price of access. What the complainants are doing is arguing about rules. Tim Cowen of Preiskel & Co, who represents one of them, told Politico that "there was such an expectation that breakup was going to change the world. It was never going to change the world", and that the critical issue is non-discrimination ^[10]. The dissent is named and specific: Max von Thun of the Open Markets Institute says the Commission should impose structural remedies rather than follow what he called a misguided decision, and that it has had authority to act independently all along ^[15], while Arielle Garcia of Check My Ads says that as long as Google keeps the incentive and the means, it has endless paths to comparable anti-competitive outcomes ^[16]. Neither is a party to the complaint, and nothing in the reporting shows the Commission formally abandoning the structural option ^[12].

The forcing function is two columns. First, the specific behaviour that costs you money at each point where Google sits on both sides of your spend. Second, whether a change of owner or a change of rule would have ended it. Where the honest answer is a rule, your plan never needed the divestiture and the conversation can happen this quarter. Where the honest answer is an owner, what you are actually waiting on is whatever obligation the Commission agrees to police, and the useful work between now and then is the evidence file such an obligation gets enforced with: bid-level records kept long enough to show how your inventory was treated next to Google's own demand. Google is appealing at the EU's General Court and said it was very pleased with the US ruling ^[13], which tells you which of those two timelines it is planning against.