The U.S. Department of Justice made its final push for a divestiture of key parts of Google’s advertising business Friday before a federal judge, the last step before the court decides how the tech giant must remedy its adtech monopoly.
In closing arguments, the DOJ urged Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to force Google to sell its ad exchange, AdX, and to open-source its auction logic—the algorithms that decide where ads are served. If pulling back the veil on those algorithms isn’t viable, the Justice Department asked that the company’s ad server, Google Ad Manager (formerly DoubleClick for Publishers), be phased out or divested.
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