[shakna]

That doesn't seem to be the case here. In fact, Google asking other's to collect consent, and then performing auditing, may well not be considered compliant after this ruling.'

> The requirement based on the article 7 above-mentioned isn’t fulfilled with a contractual clause that guarantees validly collected initial consent. The company VECTAURY should be able to show, for all data that it is processing, the validity of the expressed consent.

Google hasn't first-party consented through each of the publishing contracts. They may be able to turn it around.

However, the industry would now favour someone who had no need to collect consent, if we're just talking about the base ability. The ad-world's dependency on personalised data is a problem, and may continue having issues with the GDPR.

[candybar]

I think you're confusing Google's ad-tech platform (DFP and such) with Google's actual primary business as a publisher. Google's ad-tech business competes with other ad-tech platforms and provides services for other publishers to monetize their inventory. This is a relatively small part of their overall business that they could live without and Google the publisher doesn't need any of that to stay massively profitable. Google's own inventory would certainly be more valuable in a world where Google's ad-tech platform could not effectively help monetize other publishers' inventory.