Judge Orders Google To Relax Ad Tech Rules, Appoint Antitrust Monitor

 

A federal judge has ordered Google to relax rules governing its online advertising auctions and appoint an internal antitrust compliance monitor, while stopping short of requiring the Alphabet unit to break up its advertising technology business.

 

US District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, set out the remedies in a 106-page decision unsealed on Wednesday, two weeks after rejecting the US Department of Justice's demand that Google break up its advertising technology business.

 

Brinkema said Google should instead change some of its business practices, after finding in April 2025 that the company maintained an illegal monopoly over parts of the online advertising technology market.

 

The remedies "will be sufficient to effectively pry open to competition the ad tech markets that were injured by Google's unlawful conduct, and prevent Google from reverting to anticompetitive conduct in these markets", Brinkema wrote.

 

Second Judge Rejects Breakup

 

Google said on Wednesday that it disagreed with Brinkema's liability ruling concerning its Google Ad Manager publishing tool and would appeal. The company also maintained that forcing a divestiture would have made it harder for small businesses to reach customers.

 

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr said in a statement that the decision was a "significant victory" in the Justice Department's efforts to protect and restore competition. He added that the department was reviewing the opinion to determine its legal options.

 

The decision spared Google from having to break up another part of its internet business as the Mountain View, California-based company races to expand in artificial intelligence against rivals including Anthropic and OpenAI.

 

Last September, a different judge ordered Google to open up competition in online search, but declined to require the sale of its widely used Chrome browser.

 

Annual global digital advertising spending could grow to $605 billion next year from $424 billion in 2023, according to Brinkema's decision.

 

Advertising accounted for about 73% of Alphabet's revenue last year. The company's market value exceeds $4.1 trillion.

 

Six Years

 

The government had sought to force Google to sell AdX, where publishers pay a 20% fee to sell ads through auctions that take place instantly when users load websites. The government argued that Google could not be trusted to operate the service.

 

Brinkema rejected that remedy, saying that allowing other publisher ad servers to access real-time bids from AdX would restore "much-needed" competition.

 

The judge accepted proposals requiring Google not to force websites that use its ad server to also use AdX. Google would also have to end practices that publishers had complained kept them locked into its advertising technology tools.

 

Brinkema also said an internal compliance monitor was necessary given the "gravity" of Google's antitrust violations, although the monitor would have less oversight than the government had sought.

 

The changes must remain in place for six years, rather than the 15 years sought by the Justice Department and several states that also sued Google.

 

After issuing her ruling, Brinkema gave both sides 14 days to seek redactions of confidential information from the written decision and 30 days to file a proposed final judgment reflecting the remedies she has ordered.