Judge Leonie M. Brinkema is on the clock.
The federal judge, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, heard three hours of closing arguments on Friday from lawyers for the Justice Department and Google over the right way to fix the company’s monopoly in advertising technology. Now the decision is in the judge’s hands, and she said the ruling was likely to come next year.
The government has asked the court to force Google to spin off the technology that runs transactions between ad buyers and sellers, known as an ad exchange, and to share some data, among other measures. The company has countered with a narrower proposal.
Judge Brinkema, who ruled earlier this year that Google had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in some areas of ad technology, posed only a few questions. Most focused on whether a breakup of Google’s ad technology would take too long to alter the dynamics of a fast-moving industry.
“I am concerned about the timing of all this,” she said, noting that a likely appeal of her original ruling by Google could further delay a sale of its assets. A court order that forced the company to change its behavior could take effect quickly, she said.
Judge Brinkema’s decision could disrupt an important part of Google’s $3.64 trillion business that helps underpin its dominance online. If she orders a breakup, it would be the first for a tech giant in the modern internet area.
Google dodged that fate this year after a judge decided against forcing the company to sell its popular Chrome browser in a separate monopoly case over internet search. Instead, the judge ordered some data sharing and other minor changes, in a win for the company.
But antitrust experts have said the ad tech case could provide one of the clearest chances for a judge to force a tech giant to spin off part of its business.
The cases against Google are part of a larger government campaign to rein in the power of the biggest tech companies. While U.S. regulators scored some early victories, they are increasingly on the back foot. This week, a judge ruled that Meta did not illegally stifle competition in social media by buying Instagram and WhatsApp, in an attempt to cement its dominance.
The government has also sued Apple over accusations that it made it difficult to ditch the company’s devices, and Amazon on claims the company squeezes the small merchants dependent on its marketplace.
The advertising technology case stems from a lawsuit — United States et al. v. Google — filed by the Justice Department and a group of states in 2023. The government argued that Google dominated every part of a system that places ads on websites.
When a web page loads, the company’s system runs an auction to sell the online ad space to a marketer. Google receives 8.2 million requests to sell ad space every second, one of its employees testified this year.
The government said that Google used its dominance to take a bigger cut from those transactions.
Judge Brinkema agreed in an April ruling, saying the company had monopolies over two parts of the ad system: the tools used by publishers to sell ads and the software that facilitates their transactions with advertisers. The government did not prove Google had a monopoly over tools used by advertisers to buy space, she added.
Judge Brinkema convened a two-week hearing starting in September to determine how to fix the monopolies.
The government argued that Google should be forced to spin off its ad exchange and make the code public for the tools that publishers use to sell ads. It should also potentially be forced to divest the rest of those tools for publishers if competition does not improve, the government said.
Google’s proposal was more limited. It would change some of its practices to make it easier for rivals to compete, the company has said. It would also share more data with publishers about how it auctions off ads, and make it easier for publishers to use competing ad tools with Google’s system.
Judge Brinkema had previously offered different windows into her thinking.
At a hearing in May after her ruling, she asked whether forcing Google to spin off its ad exchange would resolve concerns about its monopoly. But at the hearing in September, she pressed lawyers and witnesses on whether it would be sufficient to simply put limits on Google’s behavior enforced by a court order.
On Friday, she said her decision, which is already being crafted, would have to resolve the “core” issue of whether or not to order a breakup.
Matthew Huppert, a lawyer for the Justice Department, said that a breakup of Google’s business was necessary to restore competition to the ad technology industry. If the judge only required Google to change its behavior, the company would do everything it could to limit those changes and blunt their impact, he said.
“A brighter, more competitive future for the open web is not just possible, it is urgently needed,” he said.
In response to the judge’s concerns about the time frame of a breakup, Mr. Huppert pointed to an internal Google estimate that a deal to sell its ad exchange would take less than two years to close.
Google’s lead litigator, Karen Dunn, said that it would take far longer for a new owner of the ad exchange to transfer over data from Google’s customers, extending that timeline. In contrast, it would take only between a year and 15 months to put in place the measures Google has proposed to fix its monopoly, she said.
The government’s demand for a breakup was extreme and not justified under previous legal cases, Ms. Dunn argued.
“How can the government still be overreaching for divestiture?” she asked.
David McCabe is a Times reporter who covers the complex legal and policy issues created by the digital economy and new technologies.
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