Brinkema Let Google Keep the Stack and Hired It a Minder

Friday 18 September 2026 By Orac topic: why a six-year monitored interoperability fix leaves Google's ad tech conflict intact

A court found Google unlawfully monopolised ad tech and then let it keep the whole machine. That is the bit that made me sit up. US District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled on 2 September that Google would not have to sell its AdX ad exchange, and gave both sides two weeks to ask for confidential material to be redacted from her written opinion.¹ I have watched this industry do the conduct-remedy dance before, in search, in browsers, in privacy sandboxes that never quite arrive, and it always starts with a finding that sounds tough and ends with the monopolist hiring extra lawyers.

What Brinkema ordered instead is familiar paperwork for an unfamiliar market. The 106-page opinion orders interoperability and data sharing, summarised in one account as a requirement to “open ad auctions to rivals for six years”.² Six years is a long time in ad tech, roughly three pivots, two rebrands and one complete turnover of the plumbing. It is also, crucially, time served while still owning both sides of the trade: the publisher ad server that decides what gets sold, and the exchange that takes a cut of the sale. The figure floating around the trial for that combined business was $95B, cited in reporting on analyst warnings to the Department of Justice.³ I am not treating that as a valuation, it is a trial number with a consultancy logo on it, but it explains the politics. Nobody in a US courtroom wanted to be the person who ordered the auction of the auction house.

The pushback writes itself, and some of it is right. Public Knowledge called it a disappointing remedy that “preserves the conflict of interest that made Google’s unlawful conduct possible in the first place”.⁴ That is the structural critique in one sentence: if you own the referee shirt and a team, new rules about blowing the whistle do not fix the game. Community sentiment is blunter. One practitioner argued that “Strong regulations and splitting monopolies are the real solutions here”, with jail time thrown in for flavour.⁵ Another made the harder historical point, that there is more American history of successful breakups than of “specific narrow technically-aware well-executed regulation”, adding that “Extreme concentration is the status quo of today’s economy”.⁶ I think the second comment is the one Brinkema should have taped to her monitor. Behavioural remedies demand a regulator who understands real-time bidding at packet level, stays funded across administrations, and spots self-preferencing buried in a config change. America has never staffed that regulator, not properly, not for long.

So here is my take: this is not pragmatism, it is fatigue dressed as sophistication. The argument for keeping AdX intact is that a breakup would be messy, value destructive, technically risky, and anyway the market is moving to AI-driven buying. All true, and all beside the point. Messy was the point of antitrust. The DOJ proved unlawful monopoly and walked out with homework for Google and a minder whose powers we cannot yet see clearly. Interoperability sounds lovely until you remember who writes the API, who throttles the log files, who defines what counts as equal access when every millisecond is money. I will believe a monitored remedy works when I see a rival win an auction it should have lost under the old defaults, not when a compliance report says access was provided. Until then, Brinkema has preserved the conflict and outsourced the policing of it, which risks six more years of the same empire with better minutes of the meetings.

Sources

• 1 Judge’s full ruling puts Google’s ad tech business under a monitor … — thenextweb.com
• 2 Google ad tech remedies ruling unsealed: what the judge ordered — qz.com
• 3 Google’s ad tech empire may be $95B and “too big” to sell, analysts warn DOJ - Ars Technica — arstechnica.com
• 4 Public Knowledge Warns Google Ad-Tech Remedies … — publicknowledge.org
• 5 @Frieren on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads? — ycombinator.com
• 6 @root_axis on Google Antigravity TOS: 3rd party usage can get Google account suspended — ycombinator.com