Google lost the antitrust case. Then, somehow, it won it anyway.

Google has now achieved one of the stranger feats in antitrust history: get declared an illegal monopolist, keep the monopoly intact and call it a day.

On Wednesday, Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Justice Department’s request to force Google to divest AdX, the exchange at the center of its publisher ad tech business. Brinkema had already ruled in April 2025 that Google illegally monopolized the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets.

Instead of structural separation, Google will face behavioral remedies, apparently including requirements that its ad tech products interoperate more fairly with competitors. The detailed opinion remains sealed for now.

We don’t yet know exactly how sharp the behavioral teeth will be. But we know there won’t be an amputation.

The open internet needed a bigger win

Divestiture could have fundamentally changed the competitive geometry of ad tech.

Separating AdX from Google’s publisher ad server would have removed the most problematic feature of Google’s position: one company owning critical infrastructure for selling publisher inventory while also owning the exchange competing to monetize that inventory.

An independent AdX could have competed for publisher business on its merits, not on its overwhelming market power. Rival SSPs could have competed against it without simultaneously confronting Google’s control elsewhere in the transaction. Publishers might have gained more leverage over fees and demand. More publisher revenue could have meant more money for journalism and content rather than another toll collected by Mountain View.

Behavioral remedies can improve things. Mandated interoperability, equal access to inventory or auction information and restrictions on self-preferencing could make it easier for independent ad tech companies to compete. Google itself proposed giving rival exchanges equal access to supply and allowing publishers to integrate competing technology.

But there’s an obvious problem: Behavioral remedies require somebody to police the behavior.

Google employs enough lawyers and engineers to populate a respectable European principality. Every rule creates questions about implementation, interpretation and enforcement. A divestiture changes incentives. Behavioral remedies ask Google to behave differently despite largely preserving those incentives.

For Google, Christmas came early

Google gets to keep the machine. That matters more strategically than the direct revenue of AdX. Google retains an integrated position spanning critical parts of publisher monetization and exchange infrastructure, along with the data, scale and feedback loops those positions create. 

Wall Street understood the message. There, the news is not that the Google shares rose, if mildly, by less than 1%. It’s that the stock price did not decline. The market appears to have concluded that being found liable for illegal monopolization is considerably less alarming when the punishment leaves the corporate structure standing.

Advertisers should care too

This case has often been framed as Google versus publishers and SSPs. But the reality is that this also affects buyers.

Healthy advertising markets need vigorous competition on both sides of the transaction. Independent SSPs need enough scale to innovate. Publishers need enough revenue to produce inventory advertisers actually want. DSPs need a diverse supply ecosystem rather than one increasingly dictated by giant, vertically integrated platforms. Less competition eventually means fewer choices, weaker negotiating leverage and slower innovation.

The irony is that advertisers complain about the increasing complexity in programmatic advertising. Perhaps agentic advertising can reduce that complexity while preserving buyers’ choice.

A remedy, but probably not a cure

Brinkema’s caution is understandable. Breaking apart deeply integrated technology is difficult. During the remedies trial, she reportedly raised concerns that divestiture could take years of appeals and questioned who would even buy and operate AdX. A botched breakup could create real disruption.

But antitrust remedies are supposed to restore competition after illegal monopolization has been established. If courts repeatedly conclude that dominant technology companies broke antitrust law, then conclude that actually restructuring them would be too disruptive, we have created a fascinating incentive system for becoming enormously dominant.

The behavioral remedies may prove meaningful. Interoperability could shift spend toward independent platforms and give publishers genuine alternatives. Much depends on details we haven’t seen yet.

For now, though, Google has suffered the increasingly fashionable Silicon Valley punishment: being declared a monopolist and allowed to remain one. 

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.