Penalizing a company for building the best product fails to help businesses or users, according to antitrust enforcers.
After a 2025 ruling finding Google guilty of knowingly acquiring and maintaining monopoly power in the online advertising market, Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia on Wednesday rejected a Justice Department plan that would have compelled Google to divest portions of its advertising operations as punishment.
The judge’s decision is sealed for 14 days, leaving the reasoning behind the rejection of the breakup unclear. Nevertheless, The Wall Street Journal reports Brinkema had previously questioned the practicality of splitting up the company and expressed unease at not knowing who would purchase and operate Google’s ad exchange in the future. Instead, she indicated the court could order Google to halt the anti-competitive conduct it was found to have engaged in.
Her hesitation about mandating a sale is reasonable.
Google commands a substantial slice of the advertising market because it delivers the leading product. With no guarantee that any successor would manage the ad technology more effectively, it is difficult to argue that divestiture would benefit users or advertisers—the two groups supposedly harmed by Google’s alleged monopoly.
An involuntary sale to a less capable buyer could raise costs for advertisers and degrade service quality. A divestiture of its ad tech business would also deprive Alphabet Inc. of roughly $42 billion in annual revenue, according to Max Gulker, a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine.
Google, a behemoth in search and online advertising, has long been a prime target for antitrust authorities over the past decade. Last September, the company dodged a similar Justice Department proposal that would have forced it to divest Chrome and the Android operating system. The federal judge in that case also rejected a bid to prohibit Google from agreeing to be the default search engine in consumer devices.
Google is not the sole target of the Trump-era administration. In January, the Federal Trade Commission announced it would continue pursuing its antitrust case against Meta even after a federal judge rejected the agency’s claim that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp created a social media monopoly. The FTC is also pursuing an antitrust case against Amazon, while the Justice Department has a pending case against Apple. None has yet gone to trial.
Although Brinkema’s ruling avoids the most punitive measures proposed by the Justice Department, it offers Google only a modest consolation. The company must still comply with most of the behavioral remedies proposed by the agency, including sharing data with publishers and granting competitors equal access to its advertising technology.
