Google May Have Lost Its Ad Tech Monopoly Case, But Big Tech Ultimately Won.

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Last year, Google was found to have illegally monopolized key parts of the online ad tech market. But it just scored a major victory over what should be done about it: a federal judge ruled last Wednesday that Google won’t have to break up its ad tech business and must instead change some of its business practices.

David McCabe and Tripp Mickle from The New York Times explain:

• On Wednesday, Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Justice Department’s request to force Google to sell its ad exchange and its demand that Google make its ad-auction source code public.
• Instead, Google must change some of its business practices to benefit competitors. The full details remain under seal for now.
• All in all, this isn’t likely to impact Google’s bottom line. The ad tech business accounts for roughly 8% ($30 billion) of parent company Alphabet’s total revenue, and an estimated less than 1% of Alphabet’s total profits. These figures aren’t likely to improve anytime soon, seeing as ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters.

So, why does this matter? Because the ruling is another setback for federal regulators trying to curb Big Tech through structural breakups. Google has now been declared a monopolist in two major federal cases (ad tech and search) without judges ordering significant structural changes to the company. McCabe and Mickle flag that the FTC also lost its monopoly case against Meta last year, while cases against Amazon and Apple are still ahead.

Our take? The bigger win for Google is what this ruling allows it to do next. While its ad tech business is slowly losing importance, Google is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, integrating AI into products like Search, and gaining ground against OpenAI and Anthropic. And it can now pursue that next chapter with its broader business largely intact.

Ultimately, this was a win for Big Tech. Regulators may be succeeding in proving that some of these companies have monopoly power, but actually curbing their power is proving much harder.