Tech watchdogs fume as Google adtech monopoly left intact by judge | Latest Tech News
Tech watchdogs cried foul this week after a federal judge unsealed a ruling that left Google’s digital promoting monopoly largely untouched – with one group blasting the remedies as an “embarrassing capitulation” that gained’t help news publishers and advertisers.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s 106-page determination ordered Google to share more data about its advert auctions with publishers and appoint an impartial antitrust monitor to police its business practices, among other adjustments.
The order was unsealed roughly two weeks after Brinkema said she wouldn’t order a compelled breakup of Google’s advert empire.
The Google brand is displayed during a press convention in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. REUTERS
Google will likely be required to apply the court-ordered adjustments for just six years – far less than the 15-year time period sought by the Justice Department.
CEO Sundar Pichai’s company also retains control of its “AdX” market, where it extracted a 20% payment to conduct online advert gross sales in real time.
“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,” said Barry Lynn, director of the Open Markets Institute. “Judge Brinkema’s decision fails the American people and American democracy.”
Brinkema’s light-touch method got here as a shock to many industry specialists after she ruled in April 2025 that Google’s conduct “substantially harmed” publishers and constituted an unlawful monopoly.
She also said the company had “destroyed” key evidence by deleting worker chat logs.
In her order, Brinkema asserted that her 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.”
Meanwhile, the judge said that the DOJ’s push for a compelled divestiture was “neither realistic nor needed” to deal with Google’s unlawful conduct.
Brinkema’s ruling marked the second time in as many years in about one yr that Google averted a breakup its online empire despite a federal judge’s ruling that it was illegally dominating a particular market.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema is pictured. Ballotpedia
In a separate case that concluded last September, US District Judge Amit Mehta determined against the DOJ’s request to pressure Google to unload its Chrome web browser, despite earlier ruling that Google had a monopoly over online search.
“There is nothing in either set of Google antitrust remedies that materially changes $ things for the news media (harmed by Google),” Jason Kint, the CEO of online media commerce group Digital Content Next, wrote on X. “Google meanwhile is free to leverage its unbridled data harvesting across its services and our lives.”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s affiliate attorney basic Stanley Woodward said Brinkema’s ruling “marks a significant victory for this Department’s efforts to protect and restore competition.”
“We will continue to review the opinion to consider the Department’s options,” Woodward said.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s global head of regulatory affairs, 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.”
With Post wires
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