Six days. Four authorities. One conclusion.
Between August 31 and September 5, 2026, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic looked at the ad tech machine and reached the same verdict from four different angles: change how the auction runs, not who owns it.
What actually happened
- September 2, Virginia: a federal judge found Google had illegally monopolised two advertising markets – then declined to break either off. The remedy is a differently run auction.
- European Commission: a 460 million euro fine on Alphabet for ranking its own services first, with 60 days to change the ranking. Not the ownership.
- August 31, Washington: the FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon – not over owning the auction, but over what advertisers were told about a pricing rule.
- September 2, Luxembourg: the General Court confirmed a browser shipped with Windows needs no choice screen, because usage is too low.
As PPC Land put it, nobody had to sell anything, but everybody has to explain something.
The Amazon case is the one to read closely
The FTC complaint (case 2:26-cv-03097) is a deception case, not an antitrust case. Its subject is arithmetic.
According to the filing, Amazon runs a generalised second-price auction and then applies an undisclosed soft reserve on top of the result. Unlike a normal reserve, which is published before bidding, this one is applied after the winner and runner-up are known – and its only ceiling is the winning bid itself. One Amazon senior scientist described it as an invented auction participant reflecting what Amazon believes the slot is worth.
The compounding effect shows in the “first price rate” – the share of clicks charged at the advertiser’s own bid:
- Late 2020: 4 percent
- 2021: 30 to 40 percent
- 2022: 70 percent
- 2024: 79.1 percent (and roughly half the time for Sponsored Brands)
Rollout was staged: Sponsored Brands in the 2018 holiday period, Sponsored Products in mid-2019, Display in 2023.
The complaint alleges Amazon told advertisers since at least 2014 that winners pay roughly one penny more than the second bid – in Ads Academy courses, developer guides, webinars and pitch decks. The scale: about 1.2 million US advertising customers, more than 500,000 of them SMBs, against a business that grew 26 percent to 19.8 billion dollars in Q2 2026.
Amazon’s counter
Amazon rejects the case in detail. It says nobody was overcharged, that inflation-adjusted Sponsored Products CPC was flat from 2019 to 2024, that conversion rates rose more than 24 percent for individual advertisers between 2021 and 2025, and that roughly 92 percent of selected Sponsored Products ads in 2024 were not the highest bid because ranking weighs relevance too. It calculates advertisers saved more than 8 billion dollars from 2021 to 2025 versus a bid-only ranking, and notes no advertiser ever paid above their submitted maximum.
Why this matters for your account
Because the fix regulators chose is disclosure, not divestiture. That means the closed auction stays closed – you just get more paperwork about it. Your job is to build measurement that does not depend on the platform’s honesty.
Three moves worth making this quarter:
- Audit your effective CPC against your max bid. If a large share of clicks land at exactly your bid, you are the price setter, not the price taker. Test lowering max bids in controlled cohorts and watch what actually happens to volume.
- Stop treating platform-reported metrics as currency. Note that dynamic bid adjustments can raise a bid by up to 900 percent – the number you enter is not always the number that competes.
- Run incrementality tests you own. Geo holdouts and blackout tests are the only readings not authored by the seller of the inventory.
The buy-side is shrinking anyway
The uncomfortable coda: the same week, the independent DSP that spent a decade arguing it could compound against the walled gardens cut about 575 people – roughly 15 percent of staff – three weeks after guiding to its first annual revenue decline.
The rules changed. The competitive structure those rules were meant to protect got smaller regardless. Plan your channel mix accordingly.
Source: PPC Land
