Tech watchdogs cried foul this week after a federal judge unsealed a ruling that left Google’s digital advertising monopoly largely untouched – with one group blasting the remedies as an “embarrassing capitulation” that won’t help news publishers and advertisers.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s 106-page decision ordered Google to share more data about its ad auctions with publishers and appoint an independent antitrust monitor to police its business practices, among other changes.
The order was unsealed roughly two weeks after Brinkema said she would not order a forced breakup of Google’s ad empire.
Google will be required to apply the court-ordered changes for just six years – far less than the 15-year term sought by the Justice Department.
CEO Sundar Pichai’s company also retains control of its “AdX” marketplace, where it extracted a 20% fee to conduct online ad sales in real time.
“After finding Google guilty of illegal conduct, this decision is an embarrassing capitulation that essentially lets them determine their own punishment in exchange for a promise not to repeat the behavior,” said Barry Lynn, director of the Open Markets Institute. “Judge Brinkema’s decision fails the American people and American democracy.”
Brinkema’s light-touch approach came as a surprise to many industry experts after she ruled in April 2025 that Google’s conduct “substantially harmed” publishers and constituted an illegal monopoly.
She also said the company had “destroyed” key evidence by deleting employee chat logs.
In her order, Brinkema asserted that her remedies “will be sufficient to effectively pry open to competition the ad tech markets that were injured by Google’s unlawful conduct, and prevent Google from reverting to anticompetitive conduct in these markets.”
Meanwhile, the judge said that the DOJ’s push for a forced divestiture was “neither realistic nor needed” to address Google’s illegal conduct.
Brinkema’s ruling marked the second time in as many years in about one year that Google avoided a breakup its online empire despite a federal judge’s ruling that it was illegally dominating a specific market.
In a separate case that concluded 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 ruling that Google had a monopoly over online search.
“There is nothing in either set of Google antitrust remedies that materially changes $ things for the news media (harmed by Google),” Jason Kint, the CEO of online media trade group Digital Content Next, wrote on X. “Google meanwhile is free to leverage its unbridled data harvesting across its services and our lives.”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s associate attorney general Stanley Woodward said Brinkema’s ruling “marks a significant victory for this Department’s efforts to protect and restore competition.”
“We will continue to review the opinion to consider the Department’s options,” Woodward said.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s global head of regulatory affairs, said the company was “very pleased the court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow.”
With Post wires
