A federal judge is coming under harsh criticism for sparing Google from a forced breakup of its digital advertising empire – despite earlier ruling that the Big Tech giant was operating two separate illegal monopolies in the online ad sector.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Wednesday shut down the Justice Department’s proposal to make the company sell off its “AdX” marketplace, where it extracted a 20% fee to conduct online ad sales in real time. That’s despite the fact she ruled in April 2025 that Google’s conduct “substantially harmed” publishers, and said the company had “destroyed” key evidence.
“It takes an Olympic level of mental gymnastics to find that Google is operating an illegal monopoly and then decide to do nothing about it,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project.
Brinkema ordered Google, led by CEO Sundar Pichai, to adopt “most” of the “proposed behavioral remedies” from the DOJ and the coalition of US states that joined the antitrust lawsuit, though she did not state which proposals should be enacted.
Her full opinion on the case will be released later this month, after both sides have a chance to review it and suggest redactions concerning confidential information. The specific remedies aren’t expected to come out until then.
The ruling marked the second time in exactly a year that Google has dodged a breakup of its online empire despite a federal judge’s ruling that it was illegally dominating a market.
In a separate case that came to a head last September, US District Judge Amit Mehta decided against the DOJ’s request to force Google to sell off its Chrome web browser, despite earlier determining that the company was a “monopolist” with a chokehold over the online search market.
“With Big Tech continuing to suffocate new and innovative businesses from gaining traction, Judge Brinkema, like Judge Mehta before her, is sending the wrong message at the wrong time,” Haworth said.
“Between Judge Brinkema’s ruling today and Judge Mehta’s toothless rejection of breaking up Google’s search monopoly last year, it’s clearer than ever that Congress needs to act — both on structural remedies generally and to fix these specific markets,” said Laurel Kilgour, a research manager at the American Economic Liberties Project.
The judge also rejected a request from the DOJ and a coalition of states that joined its lawsuit to publish the source code of the “logic” that governs AdX.
“We’re very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow,” Google vice president of regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s antitrust division said it was “pleased” that the court ordered “substantial relief” to address Google’s monopoly despite rejecting the divestiture.
“The Department will continue to fight for fair competition,” the DOJ’s Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement. “The timing of the Court’s order reflects the tradeoffs between immediate relief and remedies obtained through years of litigation.”
In her April 2025 ruling, Brinkema determined that Google violated the Sherman Act by dominating the online publisher ad server market and the ad-exchange market that connects ad buyers to sellers.
“Google further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive practices on its customers and eliminating desirable product features,” she wrote at the time.
Ahead of the trial, Brinkema expressed anger over Google’s policy of having employees turn off their chat history by default – known internally as “Vegas mode” – despite a legal requirement to preserve evidence related to the case.
During an Aug. 29, 2024 court hearing, the judge called Google’s conduct a “clear abuse of privilege” and said “an awful lot of evidence has likely been destroyed.”