A federal judge declined Wednesday to break up Google’s advertising technology business, granting another reprieve to the search giant despite a series of courts finding it holds monopolies in key parts of the online economy.
U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled in April 2025 that Google had monopolized parts of the market for selling online ads, but the judge said in a new order that she was rejecting the government’s proposal to break up the company and open up parts of its platform. Instead, Brinkema said she would accept “behavioral remedies.”
The judge’s full ruling and the details of those remedies will be kept under seal for two weeks.
The case formed part of an effort launched under the Biden administration to challenge the market power of large technology firms — one that has had only limited results even when officials have at first appeared to prevail. Wednesday’s decision is similar to the outcome in a previous case targeting Google’s core search business, where another federal judge determined that the company was a monopoly but stopped short of forcing it to give up its popular Chrome browser.
The ruling Wednesday appears to lift a significant source of legal peril from the company at a time when it is increasingly pushing into the artificial intelligence market, where it must compete against start-ups such as Anthropic and OpenAI that have leaped ahead when it comes to the new technology. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, said in a statement that 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.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case, filed in 2023, revolved around Google’s role in brokering the sale and placement of ads on websites across the internet — a process that plays out millions of times a day and forms a lucrative business for the company. Brinkema previously concluded that Google had “willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power” in two aspects of that market.
A third similar case was brought by the game publisher Epic Games, which won a ruling that Google’s phone app store had to be open to more competition.
Despite the rulings, tech industry groups have opposed efforts to break up the huge company, arguing that doing so would ultimately hurt consumers.
But Sacha Haworth, the executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, said large tech firms were stifling innovation and driving up prices and the judge’s ruling failed to hold Google accountable.
“It takes an Olympic level of mental gymnastics to find that Google is operating an illegal monopoly and then decide to do nothing about it,” Haworth said in a statement.
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