Understanding Vertical Integration in Digital Advertising and Its Effects on Costs and Competition

Vertical integration means that a company owns two or more consecutive stages of the supply chain. In digital advertising, this often means operating buyer tools, an ad exchange, and a publisher ad server at the same time. The cases of Google and Amazon show how this structure can reduce transaction costs and duplicate markups, but may also let a company use data and transaction-allocation mechanisms to favor itself and raise costs for competitors. For Google’s ad tech business, a U.S. court chose behavioral remedies but had not issued a final judgment as of October 11, 2026; the European Commission had also not yet decided on remedies.