The federal judge, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, heard three hours of closing arguments on Friday from lawyers for the Justice Department and Google over the right way to fix the company’s monopoly in advertising technology. Now the decision is in the judge’s hands, and she said the ruling was likely to come next year.
The government has asked the court to force Google to spin off the technology that runs transactions between ad buyers and sellers, known as an ad exchange, and to share some data, among other measures. The company has countered with a narrower proposal.
Judge Brinkema, who ruled earlier this year that Google had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in some areas of ad technology, posed only a few questions. Most focused on whether a breakup of Google’s ad technology would take too long to alter the dynamics of a fast-moving industry.
“I am concerned about the timing of all this,” she said, noting that a likely appeal of her original ruling by Google could further delay a sale of its assets. A court order that forced the company to change its behaviour could take effect quickly, she said.
Judge Brinkema’s decision could disrupt an important part of Google’s $3.64 trillion business that helps underpin its dominance online. If she orders a breakup, it would be the first for a tech giant in the modern internet era.
Google dodged that fate this year after a judge decided against forcing the company to sell its popular Chrome browser in a separate monopoly case over internet search. Instead, the judge ordered some data sharing and other minor changes, in a win for the company.
But antitrust experts have said the ad tech case could provide one of the clearest chances for a judge to force a tech giant to spin off part of its business.
The cases against Google are part of a larger government campaign to rein in the power of the biggest tech companies. While U.S. regulators scored some early victories, they are increasingly on the back foot. This week, a judge ruled that Meta did not illegally stifle competition in social media by buying Instagram and WhatsApp to cement its dominance.
The government has also sued Apple over accusations that it made it difficult to ditch the company’s devices, and Amazon on claims that it squeezes small merchants dependent on its marketplace.
The advertising technology case stems from a lawsuit — United States et al. v. Google — filed by the Justice Department and a group of states in 2023. The government argued that Google dominated every part of a system that places ads on websites.
When a web page loads, the company’s system runs an auction to sell the online ad space to a marketer. Google receives 8.2 million requests to sell ad space every second, one of its employees testified this year.
The government said that Google used its dominance to take a bigger cut from those transactions.
Judge Brinkema agreed in an April ruling, saying the company had monopolies over two parts of the ad system: the tools publishers use to sell ads and the software that facilitates their transactions with advertisers. The government did not prove Google had a monopoly over tools used by advertisers to buy space, she added.
Judge Brinkema convened a two-week hearing starting in September to determine how to fix the monopolies.
The government argued that Google should be forced to spin off its ad exchange and make public the code for the tools publishers use to sell ads. It should also be forced to divest the rest of those tools for publishers if competition does not improve, the government said.
