In recent weeks, a Virginia federal judge unsealed her remedies decision in the case where she had previously found Google guilty of operating an illegal monopoly in digital advertising technology. The ruling rejected calls for breaking up Google's ad-tech operations, instead imposing behavioral restrictions meant to restore competitive conditions in the market.

Judge Leonie Brinkema had determined in April 2025 that Google's consolidation of the ad-tech stack—the software layers that manage advertising transactions between advertisers and publishers—into its Ad Exchange (AdX) constituted anti-competitive conduct. This vertical integration enabled Google to engage in tying, self-preferencing and price manipulation, driving up costs for advertisers while forcing publishers to erect steeper paywalls.

What the remedies require

The court's order imposes six main behavioral constraints on Google's ad-tech operations:

  • Google cannot mandate that publishers using its DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) ad server also use AdX
  • AdX and DFP must integrate with Prebid, the open-source platform allowing publishers to solicit bids from multiple ad exchanges
  • AdX must expose real-time bids to competing publisher ad servers
  • Publishers may access and export their data from AdX and DFP
  • AdX and DFP are prohibited from discriminating in favor of Google's own products
  • A court-appointed monitor will oversee Google's compliance

Why behavioral remedies may not work

Despite their apparent comprehensiveness, these remedies leave intact the fundamental conflict of interest: Google continues to own both the ad server and the exchange, creating persistent incentives to favor its own products. Google's track record suggests such commitments carry little weight. In 2007, after acquiring DoubleClick, the company pledged not to merge web browsing data from that platform with its own user data—a promise it broke in 2016. More recently, French regulators fined Google in 2024 for violating four of seven commitments made in 2022 to address competition concerns with news publishers. Privacy expert Alan Chapell characterized Google as "brilliant at playing the behavioral remedies game."

The compliance monitoring mechanism also contains significant gaps. While the court-appointed monitor must report violations immediately, Google receives a minimum 30-day window to respond to any alleged breach. Ad-tech industry participants raised concerns before the order's release that even if Google merely bent the rules without technically breaking them, litigation could stretch for months, allowing competitive harm to accumulate before any relief takes effect. The ruling grants Google a "broad right to object," a formulation that sets the remedies up for failure.

The case for legislation

The inadequacy of court-ordered behavioral fixes has become apparent across multiple Google cases. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission recently filed a complaint documenting how Amazon leveraged control of multiple sides of the digital advertising ecosystem, extracting $20 billion from ad customers through hidden surcharges.

Bipartisan legislation now pending in Congress directly addresses the structural problem. The Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability (AMERICA) Act would prohibit companies earning over $20 billion in digital ad revenue from owning more than one component of the ad ecosystem. Under this standard, Google could retain only one of: AdX, DFP, Google Ads, or DV360.

The bill also requires companies generating over $5 billion in digital ad revenue and offering supply- or demand-side services to act in their customers' best interests. This provision would have prevented Amazon's surcharge scheme, which the company itself acknowledged added no customer value while boosting its own revenue.

Without legislative intervention, the pattern is clear: existing antitrust law proves insufficient to constrain dominant tech platforms even after courts find them liable. Structural separation through legislation appears necessary to create genuinely competitive digital advertising markets.