Judge spares Google's ad business from breakup

The U.S. Department of Justice has spent years trying to break up Google’s advertising business across two separate antitrust lawsuits — one filed in 2020 targeting Google’s dominance in search, and a second filed in 2023 targeting its ad-technology business specifically. Both argued that the company’s grip on the digital ad economy amounted to an illegal monopoly, and courts have largely sided with the government in both cases.

In 2024, a court found that Google’s search business, including its highly lucrative search-ad operation, was an illegal monopoly, ruling that the company had “exercised its monopoly power” to dominate the search industry and search ads. Last April, a second court reached the same conclusion in the ad-tech case specifically. Following the 2024 search ruling, Justice Department officials proposed breaking up the search business in various ways, including divesting Google’s Chrome browser and Android operating system — but in September 2025, Judge Amit Mehta rejected those divestiture requests, ruling Google could keep both. He did order the company to end exclusive default-placement deals and share certain search data with competitors, remedies Google is currently appealing.

A similar pattern played out this week in the ad-tech case. In a ruling handed down Wednesday, federal judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia — who oversaw the ad-tech case — said Google would be able to keep its advertising business rather than sell it, but will instead be required to adjust its business practices to favor competitors. According to The New York Times, the ruling “did not provide specifics” on how Google should do that. Brinkema’s full written ruling will remain under seal for 14 days to allow redactions; her finding that Google acted illegally in maintaining its ad-tech business dates back to April of last year, with this week’s decision addressing only the remedy.

Google framed the outcome as a win. “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 for regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland told TechCrunch.

Much of the government’s ad-tech case centered on Google’s tactics for keeping its search engine the default across devices worldwide, which in turn helped its ad business dominate: exclusive agreements with device manufacturers that made Google the default search engine across huge swaths of the mobile phone market, and revenue-sharing deals with mobile carriers who earned a cut of ad revenue for keeping Google as the default.

Why it matters

The ruling extends a pattern across both antitrust cases: courts keep finding Google’s conduct illegal but stopping short of a breakup, leaving behavioral remedies — not structural ones — as the main check on the company’s dominance of search and advertising.