The U.S. Justice Department has spent years pursuing Google's sprawling advertising empire through two landmark antitrust cases: one filed in 2020 over the company's dominance in search, and a second in 2023 that zeroed in on its ad-technology operations. In both, the government argued that Google's stranglehold on the digital ad economy constituted an illegal monopoly.
Courts have largely sided with the government. In 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google's search business—including its highly lucrative search-ad arm—was an illegal monopoly, finding the company had “exercised its monopoly power” to dominate search and search advertising. Then, in April 2025, a second court reached a similar conclusion, this time specifically targeting Google's ad-tech stack.
After the 2024 search ruling, Justice Department attorneys floated a range of remedies, including forcing Google to divest its Chrome browser and Android operating system. However, in September 2025, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rejected those breakup proposals, allowing Google to keep both assets. Instead, he ordered the company to end exclusive default-search deals and to share certain search data with rivals—measures Google is currently appealing.
That trajectory repeated itself this week. In a ruling issued on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, who oversaw the ad-tech case, decided that Google could retain its ad-technology business. Rather than forcing a sale, Brinkema said the company must adjust its business practices to give competitors a fair chance. The New York Times reported that the judge's order “did not provide specifics” on how Google should accomplish that.
Brinkema's full written ruling will remain sealed for 14 days to allow involved parties to prepare redactions. Her finding that Google had unlawfully maintained its ad-tech monopoly dates to April 2025; this week's decision addressed only the remedy phase.
Unsurprisingly, Google framed the outcome as a victory. Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, told TechCrunch: “We're very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ's proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow.”
The online advertising ecosystem is notoriously opaque and convoluted—so much so that few outside the industry fully understand it. Much of the government's ad-tech case centered on Google's tactics to secure its search engine as the default across devices worldwide, a position that in turn reinforced the dominance of its ad business. Federal prosecutors argued that Google used exclusive agreements with device manufacturers to become the default search engine across vast portions of the mobile phone market. The company also struck revenue-sharing arrangements with mobile carriers—giving them a cut of ad revenue in exchange for keeping Google as the preset search option—which further cemented its de facto status across phone ecosystems.
via TechCrunch