The Maze: Teads has filed an antitrust damages case against Google and Alphabet in New York. The headline number is not a damages claim. It is Teads' allegation that rival ad exchanges collectively would have won 6.88 trillion more impressions from 2017 through 2023 if Google Ads demand had reached Google and non-Google exchanges on comparable terms. The mechanism matters more than the zeroes: whoever controls the route into an auction can shape competition before the highest bid is compared.
The case attacks two connected gates. On the advertiser side, Teads' complaint says roughly 90% of Google Ads demand still flows exclusively through AdX, Google's exchange. On the publisher side, AdX's real-time bids are tied to DFP, the publisher ad server now inside Google Ad Manager. Small advertisers often use one buying platform. Publishers cannot casually give up the demand sitting behind Google's exchange. Put those facts together and AdX becomes less a venue chosen after comparison and more a pipe both sides must keep connected.
Auction access creates the scale that improves future auctions. Google documents Open Bidding as a unified process: eligible third-party partners receive a request, run their own auction and send back a bid; the highest net bid wins. But eligibility and routing happen before price comparison. Teads says Google used that control, plus systems including Dynamic Allocation, Project Poirot and Unified Pricing Rules, to steer bids or information toward AdX. Fewer requests mean fewer wins, less transaction data and weaker network effects for rivals. In Teads' model, the missing 6.88 trillion impressions equal more than 25% of rival-exchange scale—not impressions owed directly to Teads.
Teads says the closed loop blocked three parts of its business. The company runs a supply-side platform handling about 10 billion impressions a month, advertiser tools and publisher monetization products. It alleges Legacy Teads was refused access to Exchange Bidding, while Zemanta and Amplify later lost authorized-buyer access after allowing first-party demand through Teads platforms. Its newer EngageOS product faces the same commercial test from the other end: Teads says prospective publishers do not view an ad server without full AdX or Google Ad Manager access as a viable replacement. A rival can build the software; it still needs the dominant demand pipe.
Some liability is established, but Teads' bill is not. In April 2025, a Virginia federal court found that Google monopolized publisher ad serving and open-web display ad exchanges and unlawfully tied those tools. It rejected the government's advertiser-tool monopolization claim. Teads must still prove its own standing, causation and damages, and Google has not answered this complaint. Google disputes the market framing, argues buyers and publishers use several platforms, and proposes more interoperability rather than a break-up, including making AdX real-time bids available to rival ad servers.
Why it matters: Retail media networks, marketplaces and ecommerce advertisers increasingly depend on auctions they do not operate. The lesson is broader than display ads: a platform can publish neutral auction rules while retaining power over who receives the request, which data travels with it and which route reaches must-have demand. If Teads connects that routing advantage to measurable injury, damages will add pressure for structural change. If it cannot, Google can argue that interoperability fixes the bottleneck without dismantling the stack. The next fight is not simply who bids highest. It is who gets invited to bid at all.
Sources: PPC Land | Teads complaint | Virginia opinion | Google Open Bidding | Google remedies position
