The ruling came down on a Thursday. By Monday I was on a budget call where we renewed the same display line we renewed in January, through the same stack, with the same two vendors, and nobody said the word monopoly out loud.
A federal judge in Virginia found that Google illegally monopolized parts of the advertising technology market. The publisher ad server. The exchange. The tie between them. That is the second time in nine months a court has looked at this company and reached for that word.
The response from our industry was a shrug and a renewal.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I understand the shrug. Remedies take years. Appeals take longer. Nobody wants to explain to a CFO that they moved forty percent of their reach into an untested pipe because of a district court opinion in April. The rational short term move is to keep buying.
Dependency is not a decision you make once. It is a hundred small conveniences you accept until there is no other road out of town.
Here is the part that gets lost. The court did not tell us anything new. It told us the thing we already knew, on the record, with findings of fact attached. Anyone who has ever tried to reconcile a supply path knew the auction was not a market in the way markets are supposed to work. We just did not have a judge saying so.
So what do you do with a ruling you cannot act on this quarter? Three things.
One, write down your dependency. Not in a deck. In a spreadsheet, with a number on it. What percentage of your reach, your measurement, your attribution, and your creative approval sits inside one company? If you cannot answer that in an afternoon, that is the finding.
Two, fund one alternative and let it be inefficient. Direct publisher deals, a newsletter buy, out of home in three cities, a retail media test. It will underperform on the dashboard, because the dashboard was built by the incumbent. Run it for a year anyway.
Three, stop calling owned channels a nice to have. Email, an app, a shelf, a storefront. Patagonia and Liquid Death did not build their audiences inside somebody else's auction, and both of them are annoyingly hard to disintermediate. That is not a coincidence. That is the whole strategy.
It is a hundred small conveniences you accept until there is no other road out of town.
Friday I sang Landslide at the sticky place off Belmont, badly and with total commitment, and the host called me baby and told me to breathe through the bridge. I did not. Some dependencies you keep on purpose. The other kind you should at least measure.