Tech Policy Press - DOJ vs Google: Back to Court for Remedies to Break Digital Ads Monopoly
Karina Montoya, senior reporter, wrote about the remedies hearings in the DOJ’s case against Google’s ad tech monopoly. She explained that the government is returning to court to push for a mix of structural separations and behavioral fixes to break open markets long dominated by Google.
The United States Department of Justice and Google will face off again today in federal court in Virginia. This time, the parties will argue about the types of remedies the court should impose to unwind Google’s illegal monopoly in the ad tech market.
The remedies phase, slated to last two weeks, follows a ruling by Judge Leonie Brinkema that found Google liable for anticompetitive practices to favor its own ad tech business, crushing competitors and going against the interests of publishers. Invisible to users, ad tech platforms have become key intermediators that manage and execute ad sales across the web for publishers — mainly news publishers — and advertisers, driving a digital ads industry worth more than $300 billion in the US as of 2025.
Google’s ad tech business, made up of fees charged to publishers and advertisers, posted $30 billion in revenues in 2024, double from a decade ago, per SEC filings. During that period, revenues from Search and YouTube have multiplied five fold to $234 billion. By contrast, the US news media market — the core of Google’s ad tech customers on the supply side — has seen print ad revenues shrink from $12 billion in 2017 to $5 billion last year, with digital ad revenues remaining stagnant at $5 billion annually, according to Axios.
The remedies hearings for the Google Ad Tech case will mark the second attempt by the DOJ to convince a federal judge that a combination of structural separations and behavioral changes is needed to pry open markets monopolized by Google. Earlier this month, in a separate case against Google’s search monopoly, D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta sided mostly with Google’s remedies proposal. He rejected the DOJ’s request to spin-off Chrome and allowed Google to continue making payments to Apple and other phone providers to make Google their default search option.
To help Tech Policy Press readers consider the news out of the court over the next two weeks, here’s a run-down of the main proposed remedies by each party that we can expect will be at the center of the arguments in the proceedings:
Read full article here.