Google should relax ad tech rules, appoint antitrust monitor: US judge

Published Thu, Sep 17, 2026 · 09:56 AM

A FEDERAL judge said Google should relax its rules governing its online advertising auctions and appoint an internal antitrust compliance monitor, while stopping short of demanding that the Alphabet unit break up its advertising technology monopoly.

US District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, gave her assessment in a 106-page decision unsealed on Wednesday (Sep 16), two weeks after she rejected the US Department of Justice’s insistence that Google break up its business of placing ads across the internet.

Brinkema said Google should instead change some of its business practices, despite having found in April 2025 that it maintained an illegal monopoly over some online ad technology.

The remedies “will be sufficient to effectively pry open to competition the ad tech markets that were injured by Google’s unlawful conduct, and prevent Google from reverting to anticompetitive conduct in these markets,” Brinkema wrote.

Second judge rejected a breakup

Google said on Wednesday it disagreed with Brinkema’s liability ruling on its Google Ad Manager publishing tool, and will appeal. It also maintained that a divestiture would have made it harder for small businesses to reach customers.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Advertising accounted for about 73 per cent of Alphabet’s US$408 billion in revenue last year. Annual global digital advertising spending could grow to US$605 billion next year from US$424 billion in 2023, according to the judge’s decision.

The decision spared Google from having to break up another part of its internet empire, as the Mountain View, California-based company races to expand in AI against such rivals as Anthropic and OpenAI.

Last September, a different judge ordered Google to open up competition in online search, but declined to require a sale of its widely used Chrome browser. Alphabet’s market value exceeds US$4.1 trillion.

Six years

The government had wanted Google to sell AdX, where publishers pay a 20 per cent fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites, claiming Google could not be trusted to run it.

Brinkema rejected that remedy, saying that access to real-time bids from AdX using other publisher ad servers would restore “much-needed” competition.

But the judge accepted proposals that Google not require websites that use its ad server to also use AdX. Google would also cease practices that publishers complained kept them locked into Google’s ad tech tools.

Brinkema also said a monitor was necessary given the “gravity” of Google’s antitrust violations, though the monitor would have less oversight than the government sought.

Changes must remain in place for six years, not the 15 years sought by the Justice Department and various states that also sued.

After issuing her bottom-line ruling, Brinkema gave both sides 14 days to seek redactions of confidential information from her written decision, and 30 days to file a proposed final judgment reflecting the remedies she wants. REUTERS