Judge Leonie Brinkema gave Google what it wanted, and something it will have to live with. On Wednesday, the federal judge in Virginia ruled that Google can keep its advertising-technology business, rejecting the Justice Department’s request that the company be dismantled to restore competition. But she also concluded that the search giant must change how it operates to leave room for rivals, and the specific requirements will not be known until a 14-day sealing period ends and the order becomes public.
The ruling closed the remedy phase of a case the Justice Department brought in 2023, accusing Google of rigging the market for the technology that places and prices digital advertising. In April 2025, the same court found that Google had built an illegal monopoly in that market. Wednesday’s decision dealt only with what to do about it, and the government’s preferred answer was rejected: prosecutors had argued that Google should be forced to sell its ad exchange and other pieces of the stack it uses to buy and sell display ads, saying that only structural separation would undo the harm it had identified.
The market at issue is invisible to most internet users, but it decides much of what they see. When a page loads, software resolves, in the milliseconds before the content appears, which advertiser’s bid wins and where the ad runs; Google operates tools on all sides of that exchange, from the system publishers use to sell space to the platform advertisers use to manage campaigns, with its own exchange matching the two. Prosecutors argued that the combination let Google favor its own exchange at every step and lock customers into a stack that was difficult to leave.
Google’s response was brief and pointed. The company’s vice president of regulatory affairs said Google was pleased the court had declined the government’s proposal to break up its tools. Google has argued throughout the case that its ad-technology products face vigorous competition, and that the government’s case rested on a definition of the market narrow enough to make any large operator look dominant.
The ruling was the second time in roughly a year that Google has avoided being split apart by court order. In September 2025, in the separate case over Google’s search business, a different judge rejected the government’s request that the company divest its Chrome browser and Android operating system, choosing conduct requirements over structural ones. Two of the biggest antitrust cases against a technology giant in a generation have now ended the same way: a finding of liability followed by rules, not by a breakup.
The pattern says something about the law and something about the market. Courts have shown they are willing to call Google a monopolist and reluctant to cut the company apart. Divestiture is an extraordinary remedy, one that judges apply only when they conclude nothing else will work, and in both cases the judges concluded that conduct requirements could do the job. Antitrust lawyers watching the cases say the outcomes also reflect the practical difficulty of unscrambling businesses that have been integrated for years, and the risk that a forced sale would harm the customers the government is trying to protect.
What the sealed order contains will determine whether the remedy bites. Google will have to adjust how it operates to make room for competitors, and the details matter enormously: which of its tools must change, what data it must share, how its auctions must run, and who watches to make sure it complies. An order heavy with specific obligations would be a genuine constraint on a business that generates tens of billions of dollars a year; an order that leaves Google broad discretion would be closer to a statement of principle. The industry will read the unsealed text closely when it appears.
The stakes extend beyond Google. For the Justice Department, the case was a test of whether the modern antitrust toolkit can break up a platform company, and the answer so far has been that courts will find liability more readily than they will order divestiture. For regulators in the United States and abroad watching the same playbook, the two rulings frame the available options: they can win in court and still come away without a structural remedy. The government can appeal the remedy ruling, and any appeal would stretch a case that has already run more than three years into a fourth or fifth. For enforcers who want structural change, the message of the past year is increasingly clear: courts in these cases will find monopolies and stop short of dismantling them, which pushes the fight toward legislation or toward new cases built around facts that judges find easier to remedy.
Google keeps its ad-tech empire whole, as it kept Chrome and Android, and the company’s relief was evident in its public response. The price is a set of obligations that, once unsealed, will tell the industry exactly how much room Google must give its competitors in the business of buying and selling ads. Judges have now twice declined to tear Google down. The question that remains is whether the rules they impose instead can accomplish what a breakup was meant to do.
