The Google Ads antitrust case is quickly becoming one of the most consequential tech monopoly rulings since Microsoft’s saga in the late 1990s, and it signals a government far more willing to challenge dominant platforms than it was a decade ago.
In September 2025, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema found that Google had illegally monopolized the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets, violating Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act through practices like first look and last look bidding advantages and unified pricing rules that boxed out rivals.
Last week, Brinkema issued her remedies decision. Rather than forcing Google to divest its AdX exchange, she opted for behavioral fixes. Google must stop giving its own exchange first access to publisher impressions, stop peeking at competitors’ bids before submitting its own, eliminate uniform price floors that disadvantaged rivals, and share real-time bid data with competing ad servers, all under six years of compliance monitoring. Google avoided a breakup but did not walk away unscathed, since the ruling forces real structural changes to how it operates its ad auctions.
This outcome fits a broader pattern in how Washington now treats monopolistic tech power. Pursue liability aggressively, but favor conduct remedies over corporate dismemberment, at least on the first pass. That pattern traces directly back to the Microsoft case of the late 1990s and provides a useful counterpoint to the far more drastic AT&T breakup of 1984.
The Ma Bell case set the historical benchmark for what a maximalist antitrust remedy looks like. After decades of litigation dating back to 1949, the Department of Justice and AT&T reached a consent decree in 1982 that dismantled the Bell System entirely, effective January 1, 1984.
AT&T’s local operating companies were carved into seven independent Baby Bells, while AT&T retained long-distance service, manufacturing, and research and development. This was a full structural remedy, the corporate equivalent of amputation, driven by the conclusion that no lesser fix could restore competitive conditions in telecommunications.
Fifteen years later, the government pursued a similarly aggressive remedy against Microsoft, but the outcome diverged sharply. After finding Microsoft had illegally tied Internet Explorer to Windows and maintained an operating-system monopoly, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered in 2000 that Microsoft be split into an operating-systems company and an applications company.
That breakup never happened. In 2001, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the structural remedy, citing concerns about Jackson’s conduct during the trial, and the case ultimately settled with behavioral constraints instead, including mandatory interface disclosures, restrictions on retaliatory licensing, and a five-year compliance monitor with full access to Microsoft’s source code. Microsoft stayed intact.
A pivotal, often-overlooked detail in that story is Apple’s role. In August 1997, with Apple roughly ninety days from potential bankruptcy, Microsoft invested $150 million in nonvoting Apple stock, agreed to keep developing Microsoft Office for the Mac, and settled patent disputes, while Apple made Internet Explorer its default browser.
The deal is widely remembered as Bill Gates rescuing his rival, but it also served Microsoft’s legal interests. However, by doing this Gates was about to undercut the government’s argument that Microsoft had no meaningful competitor and was an unchecked monopolist. Keeping Apple alive gave Microsoft a talking point about market contestability just as its antitrust exposure was mounting, and by some accounts helped shape the more lenient outcome the company ultimately received.
Here’s the thing, folks: These three cases trace an arc in American antitrust enforcement. Ma Bell shows what happens when a court decides only structural surgery will work. Microsoft shows how appellate courts and diplomatic maneuvering, including Apple’s convenient survival, can convert a breakup order into a conduct settlement. Google’s ad-tech case now extends that Microsoft-era template into the platform era: aggressive liability findings paired with behavioral remedies and long-term monitoring rather than corporate dismemberment.
With that . . . The Justice Department is signaling that it will keep pursuing Big Tech monopolies aggressively, but that judges remain reluctant to order breakups absent overwhelming evidence that lesser remedies cannot restore competition, a bar Google’s ad business, unlike Ma Bell’s telephone network, apparently did not clear.
If you depend on their technology to make a living, then you pay attention to how they monopolize it.
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