In the same week, a federal judge let Google keep the ad exchange regulators tried to break up, and the FTC accused Amazon of running a secret surcharge inside its own ad auction for seven years. Three outlets covered both stories closely. Read together, their reporting adds up to something none of them said outright: the government keeps finding real violations inside ad auctions, and keeps settling for fixes that only work if someone can see inside the box.
Two rulings, one shared problem
This is not the first time this court has treated ad auction transparency as the central issue, as this publication covered when the liability phase closed. On September 2, Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Department of Justice’s request to force Google to sell AdX, its ad exchange, or open-source the final auction logic in its DFP ad server, the two structural remedies the government wanted after the same court’s April ruling that Google had illegally monopolized the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets. Instead, Brinkema accepted most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies: Google must make real-time AdX bid data available to rival ad servers, let publishers set different price floors for individual bidders, and give up the “first look” and “last look” privileges that let its own exchange see or beat competing bids before anyone else could. The reasoning sits in a memorandum opinion filed under seal, with 14 days for redactions and 30 days for a jointly proposed final judgment.
Two days later, the FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon, alleging that in 2019 the company quietly added a surcharge to its Sponsored Products second-price auctions, something internal documents cited in the complaint called an “invented auction participant” and a “soft reserve price.” Amazon had told advertisers they would pay one cent more than the next-highest bid. The FTC says that by 2024, roughly 80% of winning bidders were instead paying close to their full bid, up from 30 to 40% in 2021, netting Amazon more than $20 billion from over a million advertisers. “When one of the world’s largest online retailers engages in unfair and deceptive conduct, the impact can be staggering,” FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said in the agency’s statement announcing the case. “Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices.”
The stakes on the Amazon side are hard to overstate for anyone running retail media budgets. Amazon’s advertising business brought in nearly $70 billion in 2025 and the company now controls roughly three-quarters of the U.S. retail media market, according to figures cited in Marketing Dive’s reporting on the complaint. That scale is exactly why the FTC’s theory matters beyond Amazon: a second-price auction is the pricing model most of programmatic and retail media, including the location and weather-triggered targeting products this publication has covered elsewhere, still tells advertisers it runs on, and the complaint alleges that promise was quietly broken for years before anyone outside the company could check.
What the coverage collectively shows
Marketing Dive reported that Amazon’s own executives worried disclosure would cause “irrevocable damage to advertiser trust,” and framed the story around how few advertisers can actually afford to walk away from a dominant platform, whatever it did. The outlet also carried a line from eMarketer principal analyst Zak Stambor, who said the allegations “raise uncomfortable questions about how transparent Amazon is with advertisers, and whether they were paying more than they realized,” adding that “advertisers face a tough challenge because Amazon is incredibly hard to walk away from.”
Digiday drew a sharper line between the two cases than most, arguing that Amazon’s exposure looks smaller than Google’s because the complaint alleges deception inside a closed marketplace rather than monopoly maintenance across the open web, and predicting fines and refunds rather than anything structural.
AdExchanger took the opposite view in the same week, arguing the two cases are the same failure wearing different legal theories, and pointedly asked why an industry that erupted over The Trade Desk’s practices has stayed comparatively quiet about a bidder that, per the complaint, was invented outright. A separate AdExchanger piece put it even more bluntly, with managing editor Anthony Vargas noting this is “the second time that the federal government has found Google guilty of operating a monopoly but declined to take meaningful action to break up that monopoly,” and extending the same complaint to Amazon’s case.
That disagreement is itself informative. Digiday’s read treats “deception” and “monopoly abuse” as different problems with different-sized consequences. AdExchanger’s read treats them as the same problem: an auction whose mechanics nobody outside the platform can verify, whether the platform calls what it did a legal pricing strategy or a fake bidder. Both outlets are working from the same facts. They disagree about how much the legal label matters once you’re the advertiser paying the bill.
The through-line neither outlet drew
Look at what each ruling actually fixes, not what it punishes. Brinkema’s remedy for Google is explicitly a transparency mandate: share the bid data, drop the privileged look-ahead. That only works as a remedy because until now, nobody outside Google’s ad exchange could see how its own auction really behaved relative to competitors’. Amazon’s alleged violation was invisible in the same way, an internal accounting decision, made in 2019, that took a federal complaint and unsealed internal documents to surface at all. Neither the open-web exchange nor the closed retail media marketplace was ever independently auditable by the people paying into it. Regulators only found the Amazon problem because litigation forced disclosure; they’re only fixing the Google problem by mandating disclosure going forward. In both cases, the market failure was the same one: the buyer had no way to check the seller’s math, on either side of the table.
Push the comparison one step further and the industries look almost interchangeable. An open-web display auction and a retail search auction are different products sold to different buyers, yet both markets settled, independently, on the same pricing promise: a second-price auction where you pay one increment above the next-best bid. That promise is only credible if it is checkable. Google’s fix makes it checkable going forward by rule. Amazon’s case shows what happens when nobody checks for seven years: the promise quietly stops being true and nobody notices until a regulator with subpoena power goes looking. Neither outlet framed it this way, but the two stories are really one story about the same design flaw in programmatic pricing, running on two different platforms at once.
What it means for the marketing leader
Treat this as a data point about every closed auction your budget runs through, not just Google’s and Amazon’s. If a platform’s pricing logic, whether it’s a second-price auction, a “soft reserve,” or a “smart” bid multiplier, cannot be independently verified from your own logs, you are trusting a claim you cannot check, and regulators have now shown twice this month that the claim is worth checking. Two moves are worth making now, ahead of any lawsuit forcing them:
First, push for contractual audit rights and raw, bid-level reporting, not just aggregated win-rate dashboards, in your next platform renewal, retail media included. Second, treat “we can’t share that, it’s proprietary” as a negotiating position, not a technical constraint. Google’s court-ordered fix proves the data was extractable all along; it just wasn’t being extracted for anyone outside the exchange. Third, ask every closed-auction partner in writing whether it has ever changed its bidding or pricing logic without notifying advertisers, and get the answer on the record before you renew, not after a lawsuit forces the same disclosure. Fourth, if you run any meaningful spend through a single retail media network, run a small, controlled test buy on a competing channel this quarter specifically to sanity-check win rates and effective CPMs against what your dashboard reports. It costs little and it is exactly the kind of independent check neither Google’s advertisers nor Amazon’s had for years.
Two dates worth putting on the calendar either way: redactions to Brinkema’s sealed opinion are due September 16, and a jointly proposed final judgment in the Google case is due October 2, which is when the actual mechanics of the new bid-sharing rules should become public. The Amazon case is only weeks old and will move slower. Neither will resolve the underlying problem on its own. The advertisers who come out ahead from this month’s rulings won’t be the ones who wait for the next settlement to define what transparency looks like. They’ll be the ones who already wrote it into their contracts.
Source: Federal Trade Commission
