From afar, it looks like Google had a rough year.
It was found guilty of operating an illegal search monopoly and a publisher ad tech monopoly, not to mention getting hit with a raft of civil antitrust suits brought by ad tech
But zoom in a bit and it becomes clear that the past year went about as well as Google could have hoped for.
The year that wasn’t
2025 was meant to be the year when, at long last, antitrust regulators would score meaningful victories against Google.
“Meaningful” is the operative word. There have been plenty of fines – and even quite heavy ones in Europe – but no forced divestitures or major business changes to prevent anticompetitive behavior moving forward, at least not yet.
Judge Amit Mehta’s September decision in the DOJ’s Google Search monopoly case “represents perhaps the best-possible outcome for the company,” according to Alan Chapell, a lawyer who works as outside counsel and privacy officer for advertising and mar tech companies, in a research report last month.
Mehta ruled that Google must share some search data with “qualified competitors,” but required no divestiture or major changes to Google Search practices.
Although, to be fair, a forced divestiture of Chrome – which the DOJ had been pushing for – was never a likely outcome.
There’s more hope for divestiture in the publisher ad tech case, where the DOJ is advocating for forcing Google to sell AdX, its publisher ad exchange, and, potentially, DFP, its ad server, both now housed within Google Ad Manager (GAM).
It would be a crying shame if the DOJ’s case against Google’s third-party sell-side ad tech likewise results in essentially no setbacks for the company, Chapell writes.
As he puts it: “If divestiture fails here – in a case where Google systematically dismantled two ad tech markets and maintained a 20% take rate it admitted it had no plans to reduce – then when exactly does structural separation become appropriate?”
Chapell’s answer to that non-rhetorical question is “tequila.” (As in, pour me a shot to drown my sorrows.)
And a drink might just be necessary. The prevailing sentiment among observers of the remedy phase of the DOJ v. Google ad tech trial is pessimism. Which is to say, they mostly do not believe the DOJ has persuaded District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema to require a divestiture or impose severe behavioral changes.
Before the remedies phase started, Ari Paparo, CEO of Marketecture Media and someone who’s followed the case since the beginning, initially told AdExchanger that he saw roughly even odds of a court-ordered divestiture and that he’d bet on it happening. But by the end of the remedies phase, after Judge Brinkema exposed her point of view through her line of questioning, Paparo said he’d flipped to doubting a divestiture – at least one mandated by the court.
European regulators, meanwhile, are in a holding pattern with their own parallel ad tech antitrust case against Google until Judge Brinkema publishes her decision, which could come anytime in the next few months.
What of 2026?
In short, 2025 was a bit of a dud, at least in terms of taking Google down a peg and empowering its competitors. But maybe 2026 is the year we’ve been waiting for?
Don’t hold your breath.
The possibility remains that Judge Brinkema could order a divestiture of AdX. That curveball would mean a whole cascade of potentialities, including a return to a version of a “what-if universe,” which is the antitrust term for a hypothetical version of reality in which the competitive harm at issue never happened. In this case, what if publishers could decouple the Google ad exchange from its ad server, thus allowing outside SSPs and non-Google demand sources to compete on relatively even terms?
The “but-for world” came up frequently as Judge Brinkema tried to understand the potential effects on publisher ad revenues if she were to require a divestiture.
For Chapell, that focus on hypothetical futures only further highlights that these years-long antitrust sagas have “generated heat but little light.” Meaning that, while regulators have extracted fines and won guilty verdicts, they haven’t successfully placed any restraints on Big Tech targets.
Just last month, for example, the FTC’s five-year-long effort to force Meta to divest Instagram and/or WhatsApp came to an unsuccessful end.
“The only certainty is that December 2025 will not be remembered as the month regulators finally figured out how to constrain Big Tech,” Chapell writes. “It might be remembered as the month the limitations of existing frameworks became impossible to ignore.”
The gains
But despite the fact that the very biggest tech platforms continue gaining ground and dodging hits, there are still reasons to value these antitrust suits, including the ones that end in modest, behavioral-only punishments instead of breakups.
For example, last month, Google quietly began rolling out changes to its publisher ad stack in Europe to proactively remove an anticompetitive product called Unified Pricing Rules (UPR). Now, European publishers can set bid floors for certain channels. (Google previously didn’t approve of this practice because publishers would routinely require higher bid floors for Google’s ad tech.)
In the US, a partial end to UPR is likely as part of a behavioral remedy in the DOJ ad tech case. Google offered that itself. However, the change would only apply to open-web display advertising, a quarantined portion of programmatic that includes only the least desirable inventory.
In Europe, by comparison, UPR is gone altogether, and Google’s other behavioral concessions also apply to video and in-app inventory as well.
The UPR news out of Europe should spur American publishers to insist upon the same standards.
Those kinds of tweaks may seem trivial to a Big Tech giant, like clipping their fingernail rather than losing a finger. But it still matters to the mobile economy. For instance, mobile game developers stand to earn an extra $4 billion annually moving forward – and up to $20 billion over the next few years – now that Apple can no longer stop them from signing users up directly through their sites, thus avoiding Apple’s forced commissions.
“These guys are going to make more money because Apple’s going make less, dollar for dollar,” Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told Bloomberg earlier this year.
Bringing it back to ad tech, might publishers and ad tech companies benefit, too, since even crumbs that fall from Google’s table can count as a feast for an indie SSP?
A divestiture would likely drag on for years, so open-web fixes are arguably more relevant in the near term than a distant breakup.
But that argument “requires one to believe that publishers are better off with half a loaf today as opposed to nothing,” Chapell writes.
And, unfortunately in this case, “I’m not sure that the behavioral remedies being discussed will offer even half a loaf to publishers,” he added.
