A federal judge just let Google walk away from an advertising monopoly she herself ruled was illegal—handing the tech giant a six-year timeout instead of the breakup the Justice Department demanded, and leaving the publishers and small businesses it squeezed right where they were.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema's 106-page ruling, unsealed this week, orders Google to share more data about its ad auctions with publishers and accept an independent antitrust monitor. But the company keeps its empire intact—including the "AdX" marketplace where it skims a 20% fee on real-time ad sales. The court-ordered changes sunset after just six years, a fraction of the 15-year term the DOJ sought.
For anyone competing against Google in digital advertising—or any news publisher trying to survive on ad revenue—this ruling changes nothing. The monopoly stays. The fees stay. The data harvesting stays.
Brinkema was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993. She ruled in April 2025 that Google's conduct "substantially harmed" publishers and constituted an illegal monopoly. She also found the company had "destroyed" key evidence by deleting employee chat logs. Then came the remedy: a promise Google won't do it again, monitored by a court-approved watchdog, and dissolved in six years. The judge called the DOJ's push to force a divestiture "neither realistic nor needed."
Barry Lynn, director of the Open Markets Institute, didn't mince words. "After finding Google guilty of illegal conduct, this decision is an embarrassing capitulation that essentially lets them determine their own punishment in exchange for a promise not to repeat the behavior," he said. "Judge Brinkema's decision fails the American people and American democracy."
Jason Kint, CEO of the trade group Digital Content Next, pointed out the broader pattern. "There is nothing in either set of Google antitrust remedies that materially changes things for the news media," he wrote on X. "Google meanwhile is free to leverage its unbridled data harvesting across its services and our lives."
He's referring to the second time in roughly a year that a federal judge found Google operated an illegal monopoly and then declined to break it up. In a separate case last September, Judge Amit Mehta ruled against forcing Google to sell Chrome despite finding it held a monopoly over online search.
The DOJ, meanwhile, declared victory. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward called Brinkema's ruling "a significant victory for this Department's efforts to protect and restore competition." When the prosecutor calls a six-year behavioral remedy a "significant victory" after the judge already found the defendant destroyed evidence, the fix isn't just in—it's official.
Google's global head of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said 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 small business argument is the same one every monopolist uses when the law comes knocking.
The pattern is clear: judges find Google broke the law, decline to impose structural remedies, and the DOJ pretends it won. Google keeps its monopolies, keeps its fees, keeps its data. The watchdogs fume. Nothing changes. The question isn't whether the system is rigged—it's who rigged it, and how long Americans will keep accepting the answer that the same institutions failing to police monopoly power are the ones best suited to fix it.
