Seven senior executives from publisher revenue teams and sell-side ad tech vendors have graded the U.S. Department of Justice's remedies aimed at curbing Google's ad tech power — and their verdict is cautious: real progress, but far from a clean win.

After years of waiting for the DOJ to act, publishers are discovering that the devil in the new remedies is very much in the details. The measures include opening Google's AdX exchange to rival ad servers and banning "first look" advantages that let Google's exchange bid on inventory before competitors.

The executives' assessment, delivered through a structured scorecard, is mixed. Several ad tech experts framed some remedies as looking far better on paper than they are likely to work in practice. Others, they argued, amount to tweaks Google claims it has already made, or symbolic gestures that will not move the revenue needle for publishers.

Digiday convened the panel of seven senior figures, drawn from publisher revenue teams and sell-side ad tech vendors, to rate each remedy on a scale of 1 to 10. On that scale, a score of 1 meant a remedy was "cosmetic or largely symbolic," while a 10 meant it "materially changes how publishers can compete and make money." Each executive also explained the reasoning behind their scores.

The exercise itself signals how publishers are shifting from hoping for regulatory intervention to auditing its practical effects. Opening AdX to rival ad servers, for example, directly targets one of the most durable complaints in the sell-side ecosystem: that Google's ownership of the dominant exchange, coupled with its publisher ad server, locked rivals out of premium demand.

The ban on "first look" advantages addresses a second long-standing grievance — that Google's exchange received preferential early access to publisher inventory, tilting auctions before competitors could bid.

Yet the executives' skepticism cuts across both measures. Their core concern is implementation. Remedies that promise structural change in principle can lose their force in the operational details — how access to AdX is actually granted, how auction timing is enforced, and whether Google's existing tweaks already cover the nominally new requirements.

For publishers, the stakes are straightforward: whether these remedies translate into a genuine revenue shift or leave the competitive balance essentially intact. The scorecard results suggest the industry expects incremental gains rather than a structural reset.

The full ratings and the executives' explanations behind each score are available in Digiday's complete report.