Federal courts have a habit of finding tech giants guilty of running illegal monopolies, only to hand down punishments that leave their empires completely untouched.
We saw it play out again when U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued her remedies ruling in the government's antitrust case against Google. What started as a massive legal win for the Department of Justice—which successfully proved Google unlawfully maintained monopolies in publisher ad servers and ad exchanges—ended with a collective shrug. The DOJ wanted Google stripped of AdX, its core ad exchange, and demanded structural breakups to restore actual competition on the open web. Instead, the court rejected those asset sales. Also making waves in related news: Why New York City Income Inequality Is Worse Than You Think.
Google walked away with its ad tech stack completely intact.
Why do judges keep flinching when it comes to structural remedies? It's not because the legal violations are minor. It's because courts are inherently conservative institutions terrified of disrupting complex commercial systems they don't fully understand. When a company like Google generates over $80 billion in quarterly advertising revenue alone, judges look at a forced corporate breakup and see potential market chaos. They lean toward behavioral remedies—rules telling a monopolist to behave nicely and play fair with rivals—because it feels safer. More insights on this are covered by The Economist.
History tells us behavioral rules don't work.
Telling a vertically integrated giant to stop favoring its own tools is like asking a referee to officiate a game while playing on one of the teams. Rival ad tech firms, publishers, and consumer advocacy groups have pointed this out for years. Without actual structural breakups, antitrust rulings become little more than expensive speed bumps. Google gets to keep its billions, maintain its market dominance, and shift its financial muscle directly into the next frontier of artificial intelligence.
Look at the broader pattern. In a separate federal case, Google was also found guilty of abusing its search business to suppress competition. Did the court order a breakup of search operations? No. Regulators asked for major structural divestitures there too, and the court ultimately bypassed them.
This creates a glaring disconnect in modern antitrust enforcement. The law successfully identifies anti-competitive abuse, but the remedies designed to fix it are toothless. Antitrust frameworks written decades ago for standard industrial monopolies struggle to keep pace with modern digital conglomerates that control every single layer of an ecosystem—from the publisher server up to the buyer exchange and the final auction logic.
If you're a digital publisher or a rival ad tech startup, you aren't celebrating these court decisions. You're dealing with lower ad payouts, entrenched market power, and a landscape where winning in court changes nothing about your daily operational reality. Private lawsuits demanding billions in damages, like the one filed by PubMatic against Google, show that the private market has less patience for behavioral slaps on the wrist than federal judges do.
To fix this broken dynamic, lawmakers and regulators need to pivot away from hoping behavioral oversight will magically create competition. True market correction requires mandatory structural separation when a company controls the entire pipeline. Until courts are willing to enforce genuine asset divestitures, Big Tech will keep winning the only phase of the lawsuit that actually matters.
