For five years the US Department of Justice tried to break up Google's advertising business through two separate antitrust suits - one filed in 2020 over its dominance in search, the other in 2023 aimed specifically at the technology behind the ads. The courts twice sided with the prosecutors. First in 2024, when a court ruled that Google's search, together with its exceptionally profitable advertising arm, was an illegal monopoly. Then in April last year, when a second court concluded the same about the advertising infrastructure.

And then came the part that counts - the remedy. And there the courts twice backed down.

After the 2024 ruling, the Department of Justice proposed that Google sell off the Chrome browser and the Android operating system. Judge Amit Mehta rejected that in September 2025. Instead of a sale, he ordered the company to end its exclusive deals over default search and to share some of its data with competitors - measures Google is currently appealing.

This Wednesday federal judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, who heard the ad-tech case, repeated the same outcome. Google keeps the advertising business. Instead of selling it, it will have to adjust its business practices to leave room for competitors. According to the New York Times, the ruling does not explain how exactly it should do that.

The full written text stays sealed for fourteen days so the parties can enter the necessary redactions. The finding that Google acted unlawfully dates from April last year; this week was only about the remedy.

The company, of course, declared it a victory. "We are very pleased that the Court rejected the Department of Justice's proposal to break up tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow," said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president for regulatory affairs. The wording is worth reading twice: a firm a court found to have held an illegal monopoly is now speaking on behalf of small businesses.

The core of the case was the contracts. Google paid device manufacturers to have its search engine set as the factory default across a huge share of the mobile phone market, and struck revenue-sharing arrangements with mobile operators - the operator gets a cut of the advertising money, Google stays the default search. No user ever chose anything. The choice was made before the phone came out of the box.

For Europe this is not distant news. On 5 September 2025 the European Commission fined Google 2.95 billion euros for exactly the same structure - favouring its own advertising services at the expense of competitors, advertisers and publishers - and ordered it to stop. Brussels went further than Washington there: its reasoning explicitly states that the conflict of interest is built into the chain and may not be resolved without a structural separation. The question now is whether the American ruling will serve Google as an argument in Brussels - "not even the US court asked for a sale".

Because five years of litigation produced two rulings that the company broke the law and zero pieces of it sold. Google pays lawyers, changes contract terms and carries on. Which of the two outcomes is cheaper for it is not hard to work out.