Google Escapes Ad Business Breakup, but Judge Imposes Operational Changes

The Justice Department has been striving for several years to break down Google’s extensive advertising operations through two separate antitrust lawsuits: the first, launched in 2020, highlighted Google’s dominance in search, while the second, initiated in 2023, specifically focused on Google’s ad-tech division. Both lawsuits contended that the company’s substantial impact on the digital advertising market constitutes an illegal monopoly.

Judicial decisions have largely favored the government in these cases. In 2024, a court concluded that Google’s search operations, particularly its lucrative search-ad business, represented an unlawful monopoly, declaring that the company had “exercised its monopoly power” to control the search market and search advertisements. A second court addressing the ad-tech lawsuit reached a comparable conclusion in April of the same year.

In the wake of the 2024 ruling, Justice Department officials proposed various measures to dismantle Google’s search operations, including divesting its Chrome browser and Android operating system. Nevertheless, in September 2025, presiding judge Amit Mehta rejected these divestiture proposals, permitting Google to keep both Chrome and Android. He did, however, require the company to discontinue exclusive default-placement agreements and to share certain search data with competitors—remedies that Google is currently appealing.

This trend continued this week. In a ruling issued on Wednesday, federal judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, who supervised the ad-tech case, determined that Google would keep its advertising business. Rather than selling it off, Brinkema stated that the search giant must alter its business practices to benefit its competitors. The New York Times noted that the judge’s ruling “did not provide specifics” on how Google should carry out these changes.

Brinkema’s full written ruling will be confidential for 14 days to allow for necessary redactions. Her conclusion that Google acted unlawfully in maintaining its ad-tech operations dates back to April of the previous year; this latest ruling exclusively dealt with the remedies.

Not surprisingly, Google characterized the outcome as a triumph. Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, remarked to TechCrunch: “We’re very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow.”

The online advertising sector is notoriously intricate and challenging to understand for those unfamiliar with its details. Much of the government’s case against Google in the ad-tech space centered on the company’s efforts to secure its status as the default search engine on devices worldwide, which subsequently enhanced its advertising business.

To achieve this, Google forged exclusive agreements with device manufacturers that established it as the default search engine across substantial portions of the mobile market, as the government argued. Furthermore, Google entered into revenue-sharing agreements with mobile carriers—arrangements in which carriers received a share of the ad revenue in exchange for keeping Google as the default—thus reinforcing its position as the leading search engine in mobile markets.