“Google Ads” in that ruling isn’t quite the same thing as the Google Ads you’re running Search campaigns through.
The remedies outlined by the court are about the display/programmatic side of Google’s business, not Search. When someone searches on google.com.au and you’re bidding on keywords, that ad slot is decided in Google’s own closed auction – it never touches AdX. But when your Display, Discovery, or App campaigns show an ad on someone else’s website (a news site, a blog, whatever), that impression gets sold through the exact pipeline the ruling is about.
Here’s roughly how that pipeline works. A publisher runs an ad server (almost always Google Ad Manager (formerly DFP)) that manages the slot on their page. When you load the page, the ad server runs a real-time auction for that one impression: it can go to advertisers who’ve bought space directly from the publisher, or it can open the slot up to programmatic buyers bidding in real time through ad exchanges. AdX is Google’s own exchange, sitting on both sides of that trade; it’s the exchange, and Google Ad Manager (the tool deciding who wins) is also Google’s.
“First look” and “last look” describe two ways Google rigged the order of that auction in AdX’s favour. First look meant AdX got to see the impression and decide whether to buy it at the publisher’s floor price before the auction was even opened up to competing exchanges – it got the first crack, no bidding required. “Last look” worked the other way: after every other exchange had submitted its bid, AdX got to see the highest competing bid and could then just beat it by a cent to win. So AdX never had to bid what the inventory was actually worth to it – it only ever had to beat whatever number the DOJ’s case said the market had already produced. Killing both means AdX now has to bid blind, at the same time as everyone else, like a normal participant instead of one with the answer key.
Unified Pricing Rules is the third piece. From 2019, Google required publishers to set one identical floor price across every exchange and buyer for a given ad slot. You couldn’t quietly offer a lower floor to steer more inventory toward a favoured buyer. That sounds neutral, but it actually took away a tool publishers had used to route demand around AdX. Getting rid of it lets publishers go back to setting different floors for different buyers, for example, offering Google’s rivals a friendlier floor to build up competing demand.
Net effect for you as someone buying through Google Ads: none of this touches your Search account directly. Where it matters is Display/GDN buying. Over time it should mean AdX (and by extension, the demand you’re placing through Google Ads into that exchange) is winning impressions on a fairer footing rather than a rigged one, and publishers get more room to negotiate pricing with non-Google buyers too. Whether that actually moves your CPMs is the open question… It’s a structural fix, not a price cut.