The Department of Justice won its second major antitrust ruling against Google on Sept. 16. A federal court in Virginia ordered significant relief to open digital advertising markets to competition.
The ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia found Google liable for anticompetitive conduct in advertising technology markets, the DOJ’s Antitrust Division said. The court ordered behavioral remedies requiring close integration between Google’s ad tech products and rival open-source solutions.
The decision marks the second time a federal court has ruled against the tech giant on antitrust grounds. The DOJ previously won a landmark case against Google over its dominance in the search engine market.
“The Department of Justice again wins substantial relief against Google,” the agency said in a statement announcing the outcome.
The ad tech case targeted Google’s control over the tools that publishers and advertisers use to buy and sell digital advertising, a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually in the United States. Prosecutors argued that Google used acquisitions and exclusionary practices to lock out competitors and maintain monopoly power across multiple layers of the ad tech supply chain.
The court-ordered remedies are designed to dismantle those advantages by forcing Google to make its advertising technology interoperable with competing platforms. The specifics of the integration requirements and compliance timelines were not immediately detailed in the DOJ’s announcement.
For American businesses that rely on digital advertising, from small e-commerce shops to major media publishers, the ruling could introduce new competitive options in a market long dominated by Google’s interconnected suite of tools.
The twin antitrust defeats represent the most aggressive federal enforcement campaign against a single technology company since the government’s case against Microsoft in the late 1990s. The outcomes could set precedent for future enforcement actions against other dominant technology platforms.
Google has not yet publicly indicated whether it plans to appeal the ruling. The company has previously contested the DOJ’s characterizations of its market conduct.
The case was prosecuted by the DOJ Antitrust Division under the leadership of the department’s career enforcement staff and political appointees.