Judge Leonie Brinkema has unsealed her memorandum on remedies for Google's illegal monopoly in advertising technologies. The ruling makes clear that structural separation is off the table; instead, the court will impose behavioral restrictions only, with modifications it deems necessary.
The remedies trial, which concluded a year earlier, centered on whether Google should face structural remedies. The Department of Justice and 17 states argued that behavioral fixes alone would leave room for Google to exploit its dominance across the entire ad tech stack. They sought forced sales of Google's ad exchange, AdX, and its publisher server, DFP.
The liability phase had found that these platforms were unlawfully bundled together. Google had also deployed numerous policies—including "First Look," "Last Look," and "Unified Pricing Rules"—that disadvantaged rivals and rigged ad auctions in Google's favor. These tactics allowed Google to overcharge publishers for advertiser access and dictate how they priced their inventory.
Yet Brinkema sided with Google's opposition to a breakup, citing concerns about complexity and the burden on the company. She reasoned that behavioral remedies addressing data sharing and interoperability could achieve the same goals. She also noted that divestitures are rarely applied in unlawful tying cases.
The Judge downplayed evidence that Google had repeatedly invented new tactics to entrench its position whenever regulators forced it to abandon coercive policies. She also discounted the fact that Google had breached remedies imposed by competition authorities in other countries investigating the same conduct. Under her reasoning, structural remedies exist not to provide "certainty" against future violations, but to address current market harm.
Her analysis prioritized market stability, despite the market being dominated by a monopolist. Brinkema also criticized the plaintiffs for proposing divestitures without a committed buyer, even though potential acquirers testified they could not commit without conducting due diligence—a standard practice in merger review.
One underreported element of the ruling is the Judge's consideration of artificial intelligence as a potential disruptor to open-web display advertising. She suggested AI could "threaten the stability and growth" of this market, and this possibility influenced her rejection of the proposed divestitures. This mirrors reasoning from Judge Amit Mehta in the Google Search case, where he cited AI as a competitive threat to Google's search dominance—a prediction that has not materialized.
Behavioral remedies: A good first step
What remains are baseline behavioral remedies focused on unbundling AdX from DFP through mandatory interoperability and non-discrimination rules. Publishers using DFP will no longer be forced to route demand through AdX, and advertisers will not need to access DFP through AdX.
DFP must interoperate with competing exchanges on equal terms, sharing real-time auction data with all participants, including header bidding platform Prebid. On the advertiser side, Google's AdWords tool faces a non-discrimination requirement: it cannot preferentially route bids to Google's own AdX and DFP unless advertisers explicitly request this to meet return-on-investment targets. AdWords is also barred from creating direct bidding channels with DFP, though it may establish them with competitors like Prebid.
PubMatic CEO Abhay Bhutada explained the significance in a blog post: "For advertisers, the principle is straightforward: budgets should flow toward the inventory and technology that best deliver their objectives. For publishers, more demand competing fairly for each impression could create more control over how inventory is sold."
These remedies represent a structural shift in how Google's ad tech operations function. However, they were largely uncontroversial proposals that both plaintiffs and Google had already discussed. The real test will be enforcement through a court-appointed monitor and technical committee.
Significant gaps remain. The Judge rejected nearly all anti-retaliation provisions, cut the compliance period from the plaintiffs' proposed 15 years to Google's suggested six years, and exempted Google's DV360 platform—used by major advertisers to purchase ads across formats—from any data sharing or interoperability obligations.
Without divestitures, the remedy period itself is shorter: six years instead of 15. Given the time needed to implement enforcement mechanisms, Google could retain its ad tech monopoly for approximately five more years.
What about the publishers?
The memorandum acknowledges that publishers—particularly news publishers who testified in the case—suffered most from this monopoly. While the plaintiffs did not pursue financial restitution, they proposed an escrow funded by 50 percent of Google's AdX and DFP revenues. This disgorgement remedy would compensate for monopoly profits extracted unlawfully.
The plaintiffs envisioned the escrow funding an open-source administration of DFP, covering costs for publishers switching platforms, and supporting other uses the court deemed appropriate—including potential compensation schemes for harmed publishers, as proposed by Open Markets' Center for Media & Digital Governance.
Brinkema rejected the entire proposal, citing two main objections: the inclusion of DFP, which she deemed inappropriate since the liability ruling had not found DFP fees themselves unlawful, and the absence of a distribution mechanism for the funds among publishers. Both issues could have been addressed through further court orders.
One positive element emerged: Google must furnish publishers with historical and configuration data from DFP, allowing them to export this information to rival ad tech platforms and potentially migrate away from DFP. Publishers will also receive AdX bid data, enabling them to see for the first time which bids won or lost auctions on AdX.
What this means for antitrust enforcement in the US
Collectively, the ruling addresses low-hanging fruit: an injunction, a prohibition on unlawful conduct, and changes to practices and policies that even Google's own personnel questioned during trial. The effects should extend globally. Yet alongside the Google Search remedies ruling, the ad tech decision leaves Google's monopolies largely intact.
More troubling, the two cases signal that antitrust violations in technology face minimal real consequences. As antitrust expert Sandeep Vaheesan observed: "Despite being found to have broken federal antitrust law in two cases, Google generally gets to keep its unfair advantages in the market. As a result, in the words of a 1947 Supreme Court decision, in both cases, 'the Government has won a lawsuit and lost a cause.'"
