Date: 2026-08-06
Reader test
The published media scorecard describes structural platform remedies as an unverified gap. This pass answers the reader-facing question that gap creates: what remedy is actually in play, and can it presently be credited with restoring local-news coverage? It does not alter the scorecard; a new blinded score would be required before changing its cells.
M2 search record
Searched 2026-08-06: DOJ Antitrust case pages and filed remedy documents for U.S. v. Google 2023 ad tech remedies final judgment, plus the docket/status search. Included official case materials and an independent legal status report; excluded summaries that conflate the separate 2020 search case with the 2023 ad-tech case.
Finding 1 — there is a liability ruling and a concrete remedy proposal, not an implemented breakup
In the 2023 ad-tech case, the DOJ case page records the April 17, 2025 liability opinion, remedies hearing materials, and the plaintiffs' November 3, 2025 proposed final judgment. That proposal would divest AdX (Google's ad exchange), then conditionally divest the DFP remainder of Google Ad Manager if competition was not restored; it also proposes nondiscrimination, no-preferential-routing, anti-tying, data/API, monitoring, and ten-year supervision provisions.
The DOJ page's last listed remedy filing is the parties' November 2025 closing material; it does not list an entered remedy judgment. An independent status report likewise describes a remedies decision as forthcoming. As of this pass, the divestiture is proposed relief, not an observed intervention.
Sources: DOJ case page; plaintiffs' proposed final judgment; Norton Rose Fulbright status note.
Finding 2 — no record here supports a local-news coverage effect
The liability and proposed-remedy materials concern competition in publisher ad servers and ad exchanges: access, routing, tying, transparency, and ownership of AdX/DFP. They do not estimate how much additional revenue would reach local publishers, whether any revenue would fund reporters rather than other costs, or whether county-level coverage would rise. Even an eventual competition remedy would therefore be a market-structure intervention, not a demonstrated local-news funding mechanism.
Verdict: the filing may treat the case as an external event to track, but must not credit it with coverage, newsroom-employment, or civic-information effects until implementation and outcome evidence exist. The current scorecard's midrange, explicitly unverified treatment of this architecture remains the honest position.
M3 limitation and next observation point
The original protocol did not pre-register remedy-specific score conditions; this is a status pass, not a rescoring. Revisit only after a final order and implementation milestones exist. The next pass should pre-specify: (1) the publisher revenue/fee metric, (2) local-versus-national publisher distribution, (3) newsroom staffing or coverage output, and (4) the counterfactual for the open-web ad market absent the remedy.