Judge spares Google’s ad-tech business from a breakup

Back in April 2025, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) proudly proclaimed that it had prevailed in a landmark antitrust case against Google’s ad business. Yeah. Right. You see, just last week, US District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema rejected the DoJ’s effort to force Google to sell its AdX ad exchange. What began as a major anti-monopoly victory has become a mouse-sized settlement. Does any of this this sound familiar? It should. We’ve seen this show before. Last year, Google had also been convicted of abusing its search business. At first, all the talk was about how Google might be forced to divest itself of the Chrome browser and/or the Android operating system. Instead, Google was allowed to keep making search deals and only had to share some search data with its rivals. I say rivals, but in fact Google still dominates the search market. Indeed, its control actually expanded a bit. By Statcounter’s numbers, in August 2025, Google search owned 89.89% of the market. By last month, almost a year after the company had been slapped on the wrist, its share had grown to 91.1%. Boy, wasn’t that a win? The remedies phase of the government’s ad-tech antitrust case order is a similar Google …

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