The Google Remedies Turn Landmark Verdicts Into a Whimper

The landmark antitrust trials against Google appear to have ended with a whimper. Over the past two years, federal judges have ruled in separate government cases that Google maintained its monopolies in search and digital advertising tools (or “ad tech”) through improper and illegal methods. (The Open Markets Institute, where I work, filed briefs in support of the government in both matters.) While Google has been a relentlessly competitive firm, its competition, as two judges concluded, has not always been fair.

The judicial remedies, however, have not matched the severity of the offenses. In an order released to the public yesterday, Judge Leonie Brinkema declined to break up Google in the ad tech case by ordering the sale of its digital ad subsidiaries. And so, two jurists have now ruled that Google broke the law and yet refused to take away the company’s dangerous competitive weapons.

Google revolutionized how people search for information on the internet. In the late 1990s, there was an abundance of search engines: remember AltaVista, HotBot, and Lycos? Google joined the scene and quickly distinguished itself. It offered a clean interface and excellent results. Enter a keyword or string into Google and see links to the ten most useful results on page one. It eclipsed its rivals and eventually pushed them to effective irrelevance. Google competed and captured the search market by making a superior tool, becoming an everyday verb in the process.

For a time, it appeared to represent the best of American capitalism. On top of its socially beneficial innovation in search, Google, at first, refused to embrace the surveillance advertising business model that was taking off at the turn of the 21st century. Instead, it made money through contextual ads tied to search queries. Google seemed to be practicing its corporate slogan, “don’t be evil.”

Its ensuing history, however, shows that competition is not always good. As media scholar Matthew Crain writes in his book Profit Over Privacy, Google adopted surveillance advertising in the wake of its 2004 initial public offering and in response to pressure from Wall Street to develop new revenue streams. It tracked users across its properties to serve them targeted content. According to the US House Judiciary Committee, the company undertook more than 260 acquisitions between 2001 and 2020, in part, to enable it to expand and perfect its surveillance machine from search to the rest of the web and eventually all facets of life. Google bought businesses like YouTube, DoubleClick (subsequently renamed DFP), Android, and AdMob. The company that originally won by developing a better search engine was increasingly competing through surveillance, cross-platform data harvesting, and acquisitions. The “don’t be evil” motto was ringing hollow two decades ago.

The US government’s antitrust victories against Google over the past two years illustrate how the corporation has maintained dominant positions through unsavory competition.

In the first Google case, which the first Trump administration and 11 state attorneys general initiated in October 2020, Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August 2024 that the world’s leading search provider didn’t compete by continuing to improve its tools. Instead, it battled rivals by collectively paying Apple, Samsung, Verizon, and other partners billions of dollars every year to exclusively pre-install Google search products on the devices they made or marketed. For instance, in exchange for default placement of Google search in the Safari browser, Apple received an estimated $20 billion in 2022 alone. Rather than concentrate on increasing its functional superiority over search alternatives, Google effectively paid handset makers and wireless carriers huge sums of money not to do business with competitors. Thereby, it ensured Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others would remain marginal players.

While the company used carrots to shut out search rivals, the ad tech case, filed by the Biden administration and eight states in January 2023, showed Google employing sticks as a competitive weapon. Publishers, such as much of the news media, make money by selling space for ads on their sites. Among other unfair practices, Google compelled them to use DFP to access its must-have ad exchange AdX, which connected them with advertisers like Coca-Cola and Nike.

In her April 2025 decision, Judge Brinkema repeatedly called Google’s bundling of AdX and DFP “coercive.” Google did not compete and attract business to DFP by offering better terms or improving its quality. It bullied publishers to accept DFP as part of a package and to forgo the use of rival tools. In the judge’s words, Google “compelled publishers to use DFP, not because they viewed it as a superior product, but rather due to Google’s exploitation of its control over AdX’s preeminent position in the open-web display ad exchange market.” By unfairly excluding rivals, Google maintained a lucrative chokepoint over online advertising and extracted monopolistic tolls on display ads across much of the internet. This market exploitation robbed publishers and advertisers alike and left even less money on the table for ad-supported journalism.

The two judges, however, refused to take away Google’s illicit economic weapons when crafting remedies for the corporation’s lawbreaking. Last September, Mehta rejected the government’s request to prohibit Google from paying firms like Apple for default installation of its search tools. He cited the harm to distribution partners—Apple, Samsung, and Verizon are well-heeled businesses and would surely manage just fine without large payments from Google—and the purported precariousness of Google’s search monopoly in the face of AI competition. And in her written opinion yesterday, Brinkema stated she would not strip the company of its coercive power in ad tech by ordering the divestiture of AdX or DFP, even though the Supreme Court called divestitures while“drastic” also the “most effective, of antitrust remedies” and stated that hardship to defendants cannot be the basis for denying the government effective structural solutions.

Both judges displayed a dual quality of clarity and confusion in their rulings. They recognized Google’s use of improper competition in their liability decisions but declined to excise its instruments of lawbreaking in their remedial orders. 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.”