EU lawmakers urge Google ad-tech breakup despite recent U.S. court ruling

The push for structural remedies suggests that European regulators may no longer view conduct-based restrictions as sufficient to ensure competition in digital advertising. For the streaming industry, a forced divestiture could fundamentally alter how programmatic ads are bought and sold across CTV environments, potentially decoupling the buy-side and sell-side tools currently controlled by a single entity. This divergence between Brussels and Washington creates a complex compliance landscape for global media firms managing cross-border ad stacks. Watch for the European Commission's formal response to these legislative demands to see if they prioritize structural separation over behavioral concessions.

The European Commission's antitrust case against Google's advertising stack has entered a critical phase, with multiple regulatory bodies weighing in on potential remedies. In September 2024, the European Commission formally charged Google with antitrust violations in its ad-tech business, alleging that the company systematically favored its own ad exchange and ad server over competitors. The Commission's preliminary findings suggested that only a divestiture of parts of Google's ad-tech stack could restore competition, a position that EU legislators are now reinforcing with their public pressure on Brussels.

The transatlantic regulatory divergence on Google ad-tech is sharpening. In the United States, a federal judge ruled in April 2025 that Google did not hold an illegal monopoly in ad-tech, declining to order structural remedies and instead finding that while Google engaged in some anticompetitive conduct, the evidence did not support a breakup. That U.S. ruling stands in direct contrast to the EU's posture, where legislators are explicitly urging the Commission not to drop divestiture from the table. The divergence creates a scenario where Google could face mandatory structural separation in Europe while maintaining its integrated ad stack in the United States, forcing global advertisers and publishers to navigate incompatible regulatory regimes.

Google's ad-tech dominance extends directly into connected TV and streaming advertising, where its DV360 demand-side platform and Ad Manager ad server are widely used by publishers and advertisers for programmatic CTV transactions. The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimated that programmatic advertising accounted for 91% of digital ad spending in 2024, with Google's tools serving as a primary conduit for CTV inventory. A forced divestiture in Europe could require streaming platforms and CTV publishers operating in the EU to reconfigure their ad stacks, potentially separating the buy-side tools advertisers use to purchase CTV inventory from the sell-side systems publishers rely on to manage and serve those ads. The European Commission's final decision on remedies is expected in late 2026, and its outcome will likely determine whether the global ad-tech market fragments along regulatory lines or converges on a unified approach, a process recently complicated by the European Commission Article 102 guidelines that reset digital market dominance rules.