Google yet again avoided a breakup of its business — but it will have to play nicer

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Google doesn’t have to break up its adtech business — which was the nuclear option sought by the Justice Department after the tech company was found to have operated an illegal monopoly in certain online advertising markets.

It’s the second time in recent history that Google has fended off a breakup attempt from the DOJ.

Last year, a federal judge in a separate case that concerned Google’s dominance of the US search market rejected a forced divestiture of its Chrome browser.

But the online ad giant hasn’t gotten off scot-free.

In an order filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge Leonie Brinkema accepted “most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies.” She didn’t specify which ones.

Her full opinion on the case has been temporarily sealed to give the parties time to redact any information deemed confidential.

The list of proposed changes to Google’s business, submitted by the DOJ and the tech company itself, is lengthy.

They largely revolve around Google playing nice — or at least a little nicer — with its competitors in the adtech space and not giving its own services preferential treatment.

Shares of publicly traded adtech companies, including The Trade Desk, AppLovin, Magnite, and Taboola, rose in Wednesday morning trading after the judge issued her decision.

Shares of Google parent company Alphabet were also up slightly.

The DOJ appears to be chalking up the remedies decision as a victory. “The Antitrust Division is pleased that the court ordered substantial relief in the Google Ad Tech case,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement. “We are one step closer to restoring competition and bringing relief for the American people in online advertising markets.” In a ruling issued in April 2025, Judge Brinkema said Google had “willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising.” Google, which generated around $294 billion in advertising revenue last year, owns an ad server that publishers use to manage and sell ads, buying tools that marketers use to purchase ads, and an exchange that connects the two.

The judge said that the tie-up of its ad server and ad exchange gave Google significant control over which ads appear on websites.

This allowed it to serve as a gatekeeper and maintain “a durable market share of over 90%” for its ad server, Brinkema wrote.

So, what could be in store for Google’s ad business?

Google will likely have to scrap some of the under-the-hood auction practices that gave its own ad exchange an advantage over rivals.

It might also have to make its ad exchange work more seamlessly with rival ad servers, giving publishers more choice over which companies’ technology they use to sell ads.

Google had argued that breaking apart Google Ad Manager, which includes both the ad exchange and its ad server, would risk breaking a tool used by many advertisers for purposes beyond the “open web display ads” market at issue in the case, such as app and video ads. “We’re very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google VP for regulatory affairs, said in a statement Wednesday.

On the other hand, some adtech experts previously told Business Insider that untethering Google’s supply and demand sides would boost innovation in the space, reduce costs for advertisers, and increase revenue for publishers.

Still, there was an outstanding question about who would actually buy it and whether the sale itself could create another monopoly.

The online display ad market is also in a very different position than it was even three years ago, when the DOJ first brought the case.

A large share of ad dollars has shifted to closed platforms like Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Amazon, as well as to commerce media networks and streaming TV.

The rise of platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and, yes, Google’s AI overviews, has squeezed publisher web traffic.

And Google generates most of its ad revenue from search, not from serving ads on websites. “While remedies include equal access for competitors, data sharing, elimination of preferential auction rules, and monitoring, it’s unlikely they significantly change the dynamics of the ad tech industry,” the research and consultancy firm Madison and Wall wrote in a note on Wednesday.

But there’s hope that a loosening of Google’s stranglehold on the market might at least even the playing field for those who continue to operate in it.

A number of adtech companies, as well as publishers, including Business Insider, filed lawsuits seeking damages from Google over its anticompetitive adtech conduct after last year’s ruling in the DOJ case.