Prebid proposed its own plan: how the open auction is preparing to take Google's place

What exactly is Prebid proposing?

The idea has the working name "The Auction Flip." The essence is to swap the roles of Google and Prebid in the bidding chain.

Today the logic works like this: the Prebid auction runs first, and then its result goes into Google's ad server, where the final decision is made. Critics have long pointed out: whoever controls the final decision controls the outcome of the auction.

Prebid's proposal flips the scheme. Now it is Google that would have to pass its result into an open auction, where the final decision would be made by an external system. Put simply: Google goes from being the master of the auction to one of its participants.

Takeaway: Prebid's plan moves the point of final decision-making from Google's closed system into an open technology.

Why does the market need this?

For publishers and agencies, the issue of auction transparency is not an abstraction. The closer a system sits to the final decision, the more opportunities it has to influence the price of an impression and whose advertising wins.

Prebid's open-source code is the opposite approach. Any market participant can verify how the bidding logic works. This is precisely what makes the proposed plan a candidate to become an industry standard following the court's ruling.

For now, this is only a plan. Implementation would require Google's consent, technical rework of both systems, and time. But the very fact matters: for the first time, the industry is offering the court and regulators a ready technical alternative, not just a list of grievances.

Takeaway: Prebid turned an antitrust requirement from a legal formulation into a concrete engineering task.

What's next?

Two other topics were discussed at the same Prebid Summit. The first — how brands use their own data in a world of agentic AI systems (agentic systems — programs that autonomously carry out multi-step tasks, including purchases). The second — the growth in the number of AI "employees": companies are increasingly framing artificial intelligence as a separate work role.

Both topics point to the same thing: the advertising market is restructuring around automated decisions. And the question "who controls the auction" is becoming just the first of many.