Twenty-five years ago, search transformed the digital world. 

At its inception, Google was a fledgling company that revolutionized the Internet with its search engine. It built and expanded its empire thanks, in part, to the ruling in the antitrust case against Microsoft. The tables have turned today, and Google is on the other side of the bench.  

In early August, Google’s loss in the search antitrust case decision marks a landmark moment for the search industry. As it stands, Google forces user searches to be funneled to its search results page, squashing innovation and extracting tens of billions from search advertisers and publishers in the process. 

The industry now awaits proposed remedies to bring competition to the search market. The door is finally open for browsers and other search properties to innovate and improve the consumer search experience in search advertising by shaping consumer intent.

The Rise of a Tech Giant

In 1998, Larry Page and his Stanford friends invented a brilliant search engine that allowed anyone with a web browser to access relevant results to any query instantly and for free. Google now dominates search and most of Big Tech. 

At the time, the company’s algorithms were so much better than competing search engines that the word “Google” became a verb that was, and still is, synonymous with “search.” 

As Google grew, went public, and eventually added free software like Gmail, Maps, and Chrome, it extended its digital advertising empire. At the time, the only losers seemed to be the news and editorial publications who traded analog ad dollars for digital pennies when they raced to give away content for traffic. 

However, to grow search ad revenue, Google began locking out competitors, raising ad rates, and extracting value from the user experience. As it extended its monopoly into new markets over the last ten years, Google’s search revenue has grown fivefold. 

Unlocking Innovation on the Open Web

Google’s stronghold on the search advertising market is largely due to its exclusive search distribution contracts, which force partnerships like Apple to outsource search experiences to Google, making it the default search engine.

Conversely, “Search on the Open Web” is when a person searches for relevant results outside the search engine, such as on the homepage of a privacy browser like Firefox or through a shopping app like Klarna. In 2023, the size of the Open Web search advertising market was $90-100 billion. Over 90% of that revenue went to Google, according to evidence revealed in the U.S. v. Google antitrust trial.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for Washington D.C. determined that Google’s exclusivity prevents the largest Open Web search properties from controlling ad selection or experimenting with their results. The tech conglomerate is also guilty of removing search results and ads provided by Google. 

Now that Google has been found liable, the door to competition, innovation, and experimentation has opened. Most importantly, the consumer will benefit because the industry is entering a new era of curated search results. 

How Can the Consumer Benefit?

Search on the Open Web opens the door to innovative, generative AI solutions. When Open Web search properties compete to experiment with search, consumers benefit from a more modern, personalized, relevant, and dynamic experience. With a curated search experience, users can find the best result or offer from the browser or property they are searching on and skip the SERP altogether.

Google’s exclusivity contracts currently prohibit this innovation. As a result, Open Web search properties generate less than 10% of total Open Web search revenue. Today, few Open Web search properties can refuse to forgo Google ad revenue altogether — but that is poised to change. 

What’s at Stake for Advertisers and Publishers?

The Court is poised to require Google to compete in search to create incentives for open Web search properties to innovate the search experience. Breaking Google’s exclusivity would bring transparency and efficiency to advertisers, as publishers could show their search results or ads or curate those from direct sources.

Whether it’s privacy search or Generative AI, everyone from DuckDuckGo to Apple Safari to your favorite shopping app could show Google and their own search results and make revenue from their search media.

For advertisers, tens of billions of dollars in wasted ad spend is at stake – as well as the return of transparency and control over their budgets. With Google’s exclusivity deals prohibited, these advertisers can “go direct,” reducing costs and gaining transparency.

The Future of Search Will Be Curated and Driven by Consumer Intent

Search on the Open Web will more effectively serve the needs of consumers in today’s increasingly fragmented and modernized search journey.

The Court’s decision suggests that it will fashion the remedy most likely to create competition in the search results and ad markets, similar to the Microsoft remedy in the early 2000s.

A potential structural remedy, such as the divestiture of Chrome and Android, would incentivize Google to participate in search markets where competitors produce innovative user search experiences and deliver transparency and efficiency to advertisers.

However, the remedy phase plays out, and one thing remains certain: the future of search will be built around valuable moments of consumer intent that can open up the market for $500 billion in consumer spending.

The post Back to the Future of Search: Google’s Loss In The Search Antitrust Trial Unlocks Innovation appeared first on AdMonsters.

But alas, we have a projected presidential election winner, so we can all sorta go back to normal and focusing on the latest developments in ad tech… Right after we check if the latest vote totals…

Nope—still stuck in election mode. There’s gotta be a way to tie the election and ad tech together? Well, what does a Joe Biden presidency mean for ad tech and digital media? The speculators are out in force!

Adweek’s comprehensive article sums up most of the predictions out there.  First off, additional antitrust crackdowns against large tech platforms—starting with a major amendment to the apparently hastily constructed and politically motivated antitrust suit against Google. 

Sources also expect a federal online privacy law is on the agenda, though Adweek uses the subhead “One law to rule them all” when legislative options on the table like the one from Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash) would not supersede state laws like CCPA—that won’t be popular with pubs.

Net neutrality will likely make a welcome comeback before any bad actors took advantage of its cancellation. But many are curious about candidate Biden’s desire to revoke the ever-controversial Section 230 liability protections for digital media. There’s some suggestion of replacement legislation for Section 230 that might encourage more responsible content monitoring by social platforms and shared liability.

But what might that look like? No one has the faintest idea. It’s definitely not going to resemble Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) bizarre anti-behavioral ad bill that used the canceling of Section 230 protections as a punishment.

All right, AdMonsters already joined the speculating! Most definitely the Google antitrust suit is going to be amended because it’s weak and sad. Section 230 is not going anywhere because there’s no good alternative—liability protections make for a better Internet, believe it or not, and the market will have to effect change over social platform monitoring.

Federal privacy legislation is where things get interesting. It’s long been a bipartisan issue—even if we fear Republicans will try to rope section 230 revocation into any online privacy debate and stymie the process. And get this: Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and even the IAB all want a federal privacy law—namely so they don’t have to comply with 50 divergent privacy laws plus whatever territories come up with. 

“Is Florida opt-in or opt-out? Am I getting the ‘selling data’ definition mixed up with the one from Idaho?” They want a superseding federal privacy law—which makes a lot of sense. Look at the difficulties the EU Commission is having with GDPR—the report card issued by the Commission admits the greatest difficulty aligning guidance across countries’ Data Protection Authorities.

But as we mentioned earlier, Sen. Cantwell’s legislation will keep CCPA and the newly passed CPRA intact. The fear behind federal privacy law for a long time has been that lobbyists from the dominating digital data dominions would compose toothless, enforcement-free guidelines similar to ad tech “self-regulation.” The bigger issue might be baseline federal regs that leave publishers and ad tech players lost in a labyrinth of state regs. 

The post High Speculation Time for Biden Tech Policies appeared first on AdMonsters.