Google Defeats US Bid to Force Ad Tech Sale (yahoo.com) 29
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers' bid to force a sale of Google's online advertising exchange. While the ad exchange is a small part of Google's business, the ruling is the second powerful symbolic victory against the U.S. Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies. U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to make Google sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies.
The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found. The tech giant's anticompetitive conduct "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," Brinkema said at the time.
At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. During the remedies trial, Google's lawyers warned that forcing it to sell parts of its ad-tech business would cause disruption and damage. [...] The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump's first term. In another major Google antitrust case, a judge similarly rejected the DOJ's push to force Google to sell Chrome. It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry's unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.
The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found. The tech giant's anticompetitive conduct "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," Brinkema said at the time.
At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. During the remedies trial, Google's lawyers warned that forcing it to sell parts of its ad-tech business would cause disruption and damage. [...] The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump's first term. In another major Google antitrust case, a judge similarly rejected the DOJ's push to force Google to sell Chrome. It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry's unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.
We Need to Strengthen Our Anti-Trust Laws (Score:4, Insightful)
It's insane that the judge ruled this way, but it's not his fault: the law is ancient and terrible.
There's a good chance we're going to have a very different Congress next year: lets pressure them to strengthen anti-trust law.
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Dividing the yearly US spend on Internet advertising by the number of people in the US that has Internet access gives $900-$970 spend per person per year, or $75-$81 per month.
Please choose the option you want:
1. I want to pay about $75 per month per member in my family into the ad auctions to not see any ads. Ie, keep the infrastructure, but let you opt to pay your share through money rather than attention.
2. I want to prohibit ads, and accept that everybody will have to pay for the sites they want access
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These days I always google the judge just to see who appointed them. She was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: We Need to Strengthen Our Anti-Trust Laws (Score:2)
Bill "Fox and Sinclair" Clinton
Re:We Need to Strengthen Our Anti-Trust Laws (Score:4, Funny)
So, she's ancient and terrible too.
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The fix is still the same as it was from day one - ban user tracking! This levels the playing field for all forms of advertising thereby killing the stranglehold of online in general.
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And how much of it was utter incompetence on the lawyers remaining in the Justice Dept?
fewer ads does not hurt consumers (Score:2)
> Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers
How does fewer ads hurt consumers? I'd argue that a broken AdX is better for consumers.
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The customers are the ad bidders. You know, the ones paying google for your attention.
My guess is that google hasn't seen AdX reach its full, glorious potential yet and they think that just around the corner they'll make some kind of breakthrough that will make AdX worth 100x its current value.
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I hate them. I suspect that the only people who actively like them are the people who make them. But I'd also hate having to pay
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allocating scarce resources fairly until such time that humanity has technologically advanced to eliminate scarcity
Scarcity is what keeps humanity governable. If you have everything you need, who can then tell you what to do? Try telling a homeless bum to stop doing something. Give him a house, two car garage and chicken in the pot and he's at your beck and call.
Re: An unwise decision (Score:2)
Sounds like you have that backwards. The bum is ungovernable due to scarcity. It's prosperity that makes people controllable, by giving them something to lose.
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Even a bum has some stake in the game, even if they have little in the way of property.
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The bum is ungovernable due to scarcity.
Imagine a world with Star Trek replicators. Bums would be like, "Wine. Ripple. In a brown paper bag." Do you really think you could get them to do anything?
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Breaking Googles power (Score:1)
Break them into three or four companies:
- Ads
- Search
- Browser
- (Remaining Products)
In particular with Ads, Search, and Browser competing (e.g. search wanting much pay for ads and ads wanting to pay little per click) the market will get much better than with the current concentration in one company.
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How will breaking search and the browser off of ads help with giving the customer a better browsing experience? And by customer, I mean advertisers. They need the market-oriented search and browser tracking hooks to capture more consumers. And they need them all to work together seamlessly.
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- Search
I think google divested from that business, over the past 5 years or so, to such an extent that I wish Altavista was still around.
Ummm (Score:3)
Let's reel this in (Score:2)
Before Big tech takes over the US Gov
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The fix is still the same as it was from day one - ban user tracking! This levels the playing field for all forms of advertising thereby killing the stranglehold of online in general.
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For example, if we approach that from the "data about you should only belong to you" standpoint, nothing actually changes. If your data belongs to you, you can sell/trade it. You can trade it for, just as a random example, free email service. Or free search engine access. Or social media access. Which changes exactly nothing about how anything works, just some of the ToS boilerplate.
There's also an issue with the actual trackers to sor
"illegal monopolies"? (Score:3)
Monopolies aren't illegal. Monopolising is illegal, that's the actual word used in the law (3 times in quick succession, you can't miss it), it's a verb, it's an act of doing something. A state of being isn't illegal and in fact you don't need to have a monopoly or even a duopoly or oligopoly in order to fall afoul of antitrust laws.
Part of the problem is that people don't know how the law works, so they look to the wrong solutions, and the media isn't helping. No Google isn't holding an illegal monopoly anywhere that's just Reuters fucked up reporting. Brinkema did not rule Google "holds illegal monopolies" in 2025, that is just again fucked up Reuters reporting.
Those cases rest on actual activities performed by Google and not Google's state of being. The problem really with the USA's antitrust law is the burden of proof that activities actually have an impact on the market affecting customers (in this case ad customers) directly. Most other areas in the world don't have that burden of proof and they can simply apply antitrust law based on economic theory.
That's not what the court's job is. (Score:2)
The job of the courts is to ensure government is following the law and to apply it while adjudicating disputes, not to regulate the economy. Economic regulation is a political matter, not one for the court.
So, no, obviously the courts are not up to a task that is not theirs to pursue! Reuters has done a poor job with this reporting.