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A federal judge in Virginia quietly told Big Tech it can keep its crown jewels. In a sealed decision handed down Wednesday, the court declined to force Google to sell its ad-technology business — even after the same judge had already found the company operated a monopoly last year.
The antitrust fight began when the Justice Department and a coalition of states filed suit in 2023, alleging Google built and protected an illegal grip on the tools that run the open web’s ad markets. In April 2025 the court found Google had willfully monopolized publisher ad servers and ad exchanges, setting the stage for a remedy phase where divestiture was squarely on the table.
Washington and the plaintiffs pushed hard for structural relief — selling off AdX or parts of Google Ad Manager to break up a tangled ecosystem that funnels advertising dollars to Alphabet. But the judge rejected that hard remedy and instead signaled she would impose behavioral fixes, keeping the company’s ad-exchange intact while ordering operational changes that will remain under seal for now.
Make no mistake: Google’s dominance is real and dangerous. The court itself concluded the company’s practices harmed publishers and skewed competition, yet the outcome looks like the system protecting one of its own rather than restoring free markets for American businesses. The lesson for the rest of corporate America is clear — maintain scale and influence and the machinery of power will dodge the sharpest penalties.
The secrecy around the remedy is especially galling. The judge’s short, sealed order gives Washington a two-week window to hide details before public scrutiny, a move that smacks of process over principle and leaves small publishers and consumers in the dark about how the monopoly will be reined in. If enforcement means private backroom fixes instead of public accountability, then antitrust becomes a theater act and not a defense of the marketplace.
Patriots who believe in competition should not be confused: this is not a defense of corporate privilege, it is a demand for honest enforcement. Conservatives must push for transparency, urge state attorneys general and Congress to stop playing games with sealed remedies, and support concrete reforms that prevent a handful of firms from controlling the digital lifeblood of our economy and public square.
The people who build and run small businesses deserve markets that work, not adjudications that quietly preserve the status quo. Americans should watch this case closely, hold officials accountable, and insist that when a court finds a monopoly it doesn’t just hand it back to the monopolist with a polite warning.
