A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Google must make changes to address its advertising technology monopoly but would not need to break up that business, as the company staved off the most extreme measures to curb its power.
Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, issued her sealed decision after finding last year that Google broke the law to protect its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places ads on pages across the web. The ruling was previewed in a short order posted by the court.
The Justice Department had requested that Google sell off parts of its business, which it said was necessary to check the company’s power. But the judge declined to grant the request. She instead ordered Google to change its business practices to benefit competitors, though she did not provide specifics.
The decision ensures that Google’s power over the internet will be largely unchanged as it moves to dominate a technological era defined by artificial intelligence. Despite two federal court rulings in major government lawsuits declaring the tech giant a monopolist — the other in search — judges have not ordered significant structural changes to its $4.1 trillion business.
Instead, Google has forged ahead, gaining ground in the A.I. race against younger competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. It has woven the technology into its products, including its signature search engine, and poured billions of dollars into the construction of data centers that power the technology.
The ruling by Judge Brinkema is another sign that the federal government’s attempts to rein in the power of the biggest tech companies have faltered. After another judge found that Google had an illegal monopoly in its search business, critics of the company panned his remedies as weak.
The Federal Trade Commission lost a case last year claiming Meta created a monopoly in personal social networking by acquiring its nascent rivals Instagram and WhatsApp. Federal antitrust lawsuits against Amazon and Apple are expected to go to trial in the coming years.
Judge Brinkema’s decision to force Google to enforce some remedies will likely have a limited impact on the tech giant’s business overall, analysts said.
Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit.
As Google focuses more on its own ads and A.I.-generated search summaries, ad tech will become even less relevant, said Richard Kramer, senior analyst at the investment advisory firm Arete Research.
“This is a business no one cares about,” he said before the ruling..
“We’re very pleased the court rejected the D.O.J.’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, a vice president of regulatory affairs at Google.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The government filed the ad tech lawsuit — U.S. et al. v. Google — in 2023 over an intricate network of programs that sell ad space around the web, like on a news site or a recipes page. The suite of software, which includes Google Ad Manager, conducts split-second auctions to place ads each time a user loads a web page.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit accused the company of holding a monopoly over every part of that system: the service that publishers used to host ad space, the software advertisers use to bid for that space and the technology that connects both sides of the transaction.
Government lawyers argued at a three-week trial in 2024 that Google’s dominance allowed the company to take a larger cut of every ad sale than would have been possible in a free market. Google countered that it did not hold a monopoly because its ad business competed against the sale of ads on apps like TikTok and on connected televisions.
Google’s lawyers also argued that the government’s case ran afoul of two Supreme Court precedents from recent decades. One, from 2004, said that monopolists were not obligated to deal with their competitors. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that courts must consider “two-sided” markets differently in antitrust cases.
Judge Brinkema agreed with the government that Google possessed a monopoly over the tools used by publishers and the technology that connects those publishers with advertisers. But she said the government had failed to prove that Google broke the law when it came to the tools used by advertisers.
Her decision, which Google has said it plans to appeal, triggered a hearing last year over how to best remediate the company’s monopoly.
Over two weeks, government lawyers argued that only a breakup of Google’s ad technology would do the trick. They asked Judge Brinkema to force Google to sell the software that facilitates transactions between buyers and sellers of ad space, known as an ad exchange.
They also demanded that Google be forced to make public the computer code that powers its tools for publishers, and for the judge to reserve the option to make Google sell the rest of those tools if competition did not improve.
Google said the judge should not break the company up and should instead force it to change its behavior. That would include changing policies that publishers say entrenched the company’s dominance in ad tech, and sharing more information with publishers about how its ad auctions work.
A breakup, the company argued, would take too much time. It would also imperil small publishers, which rely on Google’s scale and customer service to sell ads on their sites, the company said.
Judge Brinkema did not publicly reveal her full opinion, but previewed it in a short filing Wednesday. She said Google must adopt some changes to its ad tech business, according to an order posted on the public docket for the lawsuit.
Judge Brinkema said she had granted “most” of the changes to Google’s business practices that the Justice Department and Google had proposed, “as modified by this court.” She said she had rejected the government’s demand that Google make public the source code for its ad auctions.
Judge Brinkema gave both sides up to 14 days to ask for confidential information to be redacted from her sealed ruling. After that, the ruling will be released publicly.
Kate Conger contributed reporting from San Francisco.
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