Can start-ups still disrupt ad tech in the shadow of Google?

A federal judge ruled Thursday that Google acted as a monopoly with some of its digital advertising technology, the second landmark antitrust ruling against Google in a year.

“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” Judge Leonie Brinkema wrote in her decision.

Twenty-five years ago, Google was a tech innovator rising out of the ashes of Microsoft’s antitrust case in the early 2000s. In her decision, Judge Leonie Brinkema even called out how “Google evolved from a garage-based startup.” Today, it’s the heavyweight in another historic moment for the internet.

The Current spoke with several experts across the industry about the state of innovation in the shadow of the walled gardens, and where ad tech’s next big ideas are likely to come from. While remedies for Google’s judgement could take years to unfold, the tectonic plates of the internet are shifting.

“The implications are massive for advertisers and publishers, especially if we see a true separation of buying and selling sides,” Ben Kartzman, President and COO of Attain, tells The Current.

“If structural remedies are actually enforced, we could finally see an open market emerge, one where innovation and transparency win over lock-in and leverage. That’s the kind of environment we’ve been building for.” he says.

The advertising landscape has vastly changed since the last major tech antitrust action in the U.S. against Microsoft in 2000. Given the data and other advantages enjoyed by a few massive platforms, many believe it is harder than ever for new challengers to emerge in the digital ad ecosystem.

The decisions in both of Google’s antitrust cases in the past year recognized that significant barriers to entry in these markets, combined with Google's anti-competitive conduct, have suppressed competition, limited advertiser and publisher choices, degraded product quality and stifled innovation.

For ad tech startups, in particular, that reality has made it far more difficult to scale independently — even with strong products and early traction.

“There are very few companies in the last, let’s say, 15 years, who have gone from being a very small company into a behemoth, multibillion-dollar market cap on their own,” Jason Manningham, CEO and founder of Blockgraph, says.

“Most companies have to get swallowed by a big company, and then they can become part of the bigger machine to compete within ad tech.”

Some have broken through. DoubleVerify, PubMatic, AppLovin and The Trade Desk — which owns The Current — are examples of ad tech start-ups that have evolved into significant players over the last 15 years.

What happens when challengers get acquired

AppNexus is a case in point the other way.

Launched in 2007 by Mike Nolet and Brian O’Kelley — dubbed “the godfather of programmatic” because he invented real-time bidding and header bidding — AppNexus quickly became a key player in the industry. AT&T bought it for $1.6 billion in 2018, then folded the platform into Xandr before it was eventually sold to Microsoft in 2021.

O’Kelley testified in Google’s ad tech antitrust trial that Google’s 2007 acquisition of DoubleClick — paired with AdSense — gave it unmatched power. Google letting AdSense be involved in the DoubleClick auction meant DoubleClick could out-monetize others, according to O’Kelley. He was one of many people to state that Google limited competition and advertisers’ choice.

“They had two just fundamental advantages by controlling the ad server, and by having this massive source of unique demand, that made it extremely difficult for anyone else to compete with DoubleClick,” O’Kelley testified.

This essentially created a power vacuum, where Google’s market power has allowed it to “change the winds and essentially shape what kind of macro trends happen or don’t,” says Amol Waishampayan, chief product officer at fullthrottle.ai.

Waishampayan believes the ad market is mature enough for another cycle of regulation so “the democratization of new ideas and new entities can still be allowed to proliferate.”

How Big Tech stays on top

Consolidation has been a key part of Big Tech’s playbook for decades, according to former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

While she led the FTC, Khan took a hard stance on Big Tech’s acquisition spree — 800+ deals in over two decades, some of which have led to “significant harm,” she told 60 Minutes.

“After companies like Google, Apple and Amazon helped transform the American economy in the 2000s, they maintained their dominance primarily through buying out rivals and building anticompetitive moats around their businesses,” Khan wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times titled “Stop Worshiping the American Tech Giants.”

Blockgraph’s Manningham says those anticompetitive moats are the huge data sets that tech giants own. They’re protected from competition since it’s taken decades for them to collect such massive moats.

“Building that data set is actually really, really hard,” Manningham says.

All of these market conditions — from saturation to tighter regulation and macroeconomic uncertainty — are encapsulated in series funding rounds for ad tech start-ups last year, according to a technology and marketing professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Funding for ad tech companies dropped significantly in 2024 compared to 2023, falling from $1.32 billion in 2023 to $775.7 million in 2024 — the lowest since 2004, according to data from Crunchbase.

How will the next wave of innovators do it?

So what’s working for the companies that are rising up and innovating?

Smaller companies are turning to patents to protect their innovations. Blockgraph, for example, patented a system for anonymized data sharing. Intent IQ holds over 170 advertising patents and licenses its tech to Google and Microsoft.

The company’s chairman, Roy Shkedi, says that “patents are more important to smaller companies than to bigger ones that can rely on their market leverage and dominant position to win.”

To compete, smaller firms are also getting tactical, focusing on areas where they believe Big Tech is weaker.

For Blockgraph, that’s identity. It’s concentrating its IP efforts on building a one-to-one universal household ID that connects streaming and offline data in the video space.

“I think there is a lot of investment in identity amongst the walled gardens, but they’re investing in a world where it’s their identity that needs to be essentially adopted, and they’re not taking a more open approach,” Manningham says.

Fullthrottle.ai, meanwhile, is targeting the mid-market —  an area often neglected by the giants, working with thousands of brands and agencies on their first-party data strategies.

“What we are setting out to do [this year] is to provide that easy button for the mid-market that is otherwise fed up with a Google and Facebook ad platform that has diminishing returns,” Waishampayan says. “[Those platforms are] being litigated and questioned in the open market for having too much power and taking too much money away in ad tech tax.”

Whether through patents, new identity models or untapped markets, these firms are rewriting the rules of survival — and, maybe, shaping the next chapter of digital advertising.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.