Regulators are chasing a ghost. The latest multibillion-pound class action lawsuit filed in the UK against Google’s advertising practices is being framed as a David vs. Goliath victory for publishers. It isn’t. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the modern internet functions, driven by a nostalgic desire to return to a media age that died in 2008.
The lawsuit claims Google "abused its dominant position" in the ad tech stack, siphoning off 30% to 40% of every advertising pound that should have gone to cash-strapped newsrooms. The logic is simple, seductive, and almost entirely wrong. It assumes that if you remove the middleman, the money flows back to the creator. In reality, if you dismantle the machinery Google built, the value doesn't relocate—it evaporates.
The Myth of the "Clean" Ad Dollar
The central grievance of this UK suit, and the similar DOJ case across the Atlantic, is the "Ad Tech Tax." Lawyers argue that Google’s presence as both the auctioneer (AdX), the buyer’s agent (Google Ads), and the seller’s agent (AdSense/Ad Manager) creates a conflict of interest that starves publishers.
Let’s look at what that "tax" actually buys. Before the automated stack, buying an ad was a manual nightmare of Insertion Orders, faxes, and "hope-based" targeting. Google didn't just step into a thriving market and start taxing it; they built a liquidity engine.
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When a publisher complains that Google takes 30%, they are ignoring the massive infrastructure costs of processing millions of queries per second. They are ignoring the fraud detection, the latency optimization, and the sheer scale of the global demand that Google brings to a local UK blog.
I have seen media companies try to build their own "independent" stacks. They almost always fail. Why? Because the cost of maintaining the tech, the data privacy compliance, and the sales team to fill that inventory far exceeds the 30% Google charges. By attacking the "tax," these litigants are inadvertently demanding a return to a fragmented, inefficient market where only the biggest publishers—the ones who can afford massive direct sales teams—survive. Small and medium publishers aren't being "starved" by Google; they are being kept on life support by Google’s scale.
The Data Privacy Paradox
The UK lawsuit hinges on the idea that Google’s "monopoly" hurts competition. But look at what happens when you introduce "competition" through regulation like the CMA’s scrutiny of Privacy Sandbox.
Regulators want Google to stop using third-party cookies because they are a privacy nightmare. Yet, the moment Google tries to phase them out, publishers scream because their revenue drops. You cannot demand "more competition" while simultaneously demanding that Google maintain the very tracking technologies that give them their edge.
The industry is caught in a loop of its own making. It wants Google’s money, Google’s reach, and Google’s data, but it wants to pay for none of the infrastructure.
Why the "Break Up Google" Movement Will Backfire
If the UK courts or the CMA actually succeed in forcing Google to divest its ad tech business, here is what actually happens:
- Increased Friction: Instead of a unified stack, publishers will have to stitch together five different vendors for bidding, measurement, and verification. Each of those vendors will take a 10% to 15% cut. The "tax" doesn't go away; it just gets distributed across five less-efficient companies.
- Privacy Fragmentation: Tracking users across a fragmented web of ten different ad tech providers is a security catastrophe. Google’s "walled garden" is, at least, a single point of accountability.
- The Death of the Small Publisher: Large entities like News UK or the New York Times will survive. They have first-party data. The mid-tail of the internet—the hobbyist sites, the local news outlets, the niche forums—will see their CPMs crater because they cannot attract advertisers without the cross-site targeting that Google provides.
The Auction Bias Fallacy
A recurring theme in the lawsuit is "self-preferencing"—the idea that Google’s tools give an unfair advantage to Google’s own auction.
Imagine a scenario where you own a shopping mall. You build the escalators, you provide the security, and you run the information desk. Then, a group of shopkeepers sues you because your own store is near the front entrance.
The "bias" is actually a feature of vertical integration. The speed at which Google’s buy-side talks to Google’s sell-side isn't a "cheat code"; it’s an engineering achievement. Forcing "neutrality" in an auction where milliseconds matter is effectively a mandate for mediocrity. It forces the fastest player to slow down so the slowest can keep up. That isn't a victory for the consumer; it’s a tax on efficiency that will eventually be passed down to the advertisers and, finally, the people buying the products.
The Search for the Wrong Culprit
People also ask: "If Google isn't the problem, why are newsrooms dying?"
They are dying because the product-market fit for general news has shifted. In the 1990s, you bought a newspaper for the classifieds, the weather, and the sports scores. Google, Facebook, and specialized apps (Craigslist, Uber, Met Office) unbundled that product.
The UK lawsuit is a desperate attempt to use the legal system to force a transfer of wealth from a company that figured out the internet to companies that failed to adapt. It is "litigation as a business model."
The Uncomfortable Truth About Competition
True competition doesn't look like a court order breaking a company into pieces. True competition looks like TikTok.
While regulators were obsessing over Google’s ad tech stack from 2015, a Chinese startup built a video algorithm that effectively bypassed the entire traditional search and display market. TikTok didn't sue Google for "monopolizing" attention; they just built something better.
By focusing on the "plumbing" of the 2010s-era internet, the UK legal system is fighting the last war. They are trying to fix a market that is already being disrupted by AI-driven search and social-first discovery.
The Cost of Winning
If this lawsuit wins, the settlement will be a drop in the bucket for Google, a massive payday for the lawyers, and a rounding error for the publishers. But the "remedies" enforced by the court will break the very tools that allow the open web to remain free.
If Google is forced to charge for its tools, or if it loses the ability to provide targeted ads at scale, the "free" internet disappears. We move to a subscription-only model where every niche site has a paywall.
Is that what the UK public wants? A web where you have to pay £5 a month to read a recipe because the ad tech that funded it was sued out of existence?
Stop trying to "save" publishers by taxing Google. If a business model relies on a court-ordered transfer of wealth from its primary distributor, that business model is already dead.
The real threat to the UK's digital economy isn't Google’s dominance. It is a legal system that thinks it can micromanage software engineering through 800-page court filings. If you break the engine, don't be surprised when the car stops moving.
This isn't a fight for fairness. It is a fight for a world that no longer exists.
The gavel will fall, the lawyers will buy their villas, and the publishers will still be broke.
