U.S. Justice Department Seeks Breakup of Google’s Ad Tech Empire in A Fresh Proposal

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has unveiled one of the most aggressive antitrust remedies in modern American history, proposing a full-scale breakup of Google’s digital advertising technology business.

The plan, filed in federal court on Monday, demands that the tech giant divest its cornerstone ad platforms, AdX (its advertising exchange) and DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers, now Google Ad Manager), to dismantle what the government calls a “self-reinforcing cycle of dominance.”

The move stems from an April ruling in which a federal judge concluded that Google had violated antitrust laws through a “decade-long campaign of exclusionary conduct.” At the center of that conduct was Google’s tight integration of its demand- and supply-side advertising tools, which enabled the company to operate simultaneously as broker, auctioneer, and participant in the vast online ad marketplace, giving it undue advantage and suppressing competition.

Dismantling Google’s Ad Tech Stack

Under the DOJ’s proposal, Google would be required to sell AdX and DFP to separate entities. The Justice Department argues that the company used these platforms to lock in publishers and advertisers, distort auction outcomes, and tilt the digital ad ecosystem in its favor by forcing the use of its own exchange and tools.

The DOJ outlines a three-phase plan:

1. Open Access Integration – In the first phase, Google would be forced to open its ad management platform to competitors. This would involve creating an API to allow third-party ad exchanges to integrate with DFP and building export tools for publishers to transfer their data to rival ad servers.
2. Auction Transparency – Google would be required to open-source the code used in its final ad auctions and be prohibited from replicating that code in its own services, including Chrome, Android, and YouTube, ensuring that the company cannot simply reintroduce the same architecture under different branding.
3. Full Divestiture – The final step would compel Google to divest DFP to a company independent of the one that acquires AdX. The separation, the DOJ argues, is necessary to prevent continued vertical integration that gives Google outsized control over the entire ad transaction chain.

In addition, the DOJ recommends a 10-year ban on Google operating an ad exchange and strict data-use limitations that would prohibit it from leveraging user data collected through Search, Gmail, YouTube, Android, and Chrome to gain further advantages in the ad market. These mark Google’s ad tech breakup proposal as the most ambitious regulatory intervention yet in the 21st-century digital economy.

“Disruptive and Unworkable:” Google Pushes Back

Google fiercely opposes the DOJ’s proposal and has filed its own counter-remedy. The company argues that a divestiture would be disruptive not only to its business, but to the broader ecosystem of publishers and advertisers that depend on its tools. In a filing, Google maintains that it legally acquired AdX and DFP and that no evidence suggests they were obtained or operated with anticompetitive intent.

Google contends that spinning off the platforms is not a simple matter of transferring software licenses. According to the company, the source code is deeply embedded within its broader systems, meaning it would take years and considerable resources to build stand-alone versions of the platforms that could operate independently of Google’s infrastructure.

“In the meantime, this process would significantly harm the customers of AdX and DFP,” Google wrote. “During the years of rebuilding either or both of AdX and DFP, coding new versions of the tools would conscript precious resources… and leave existing clients with degraded services.”

Instead, Google has offered a narrower set of behavioral remedies. These include:

• Allowing real-time bids from AdX to be accessible to rival ad servers.
• Ending policies that prevent those bids from being shared with competitors.
• Deprecating “unified pricing rules” (UPR), which the DOJ said gave Google undue leverage over pricing floors.
• Formally discontinuing controversial auction tools like First Look and Last Look, which had allowed Google advertisers privileged early and late access to ad auctions.

The Case in Context: Big Tech and the Antitrust Reckoning

This case is only one front in the DOJ’s wider offensive against Google and Big Tech in general. The agency is concurrently pursuing a separate case targeting Google’s dominance in search, which resulted in another legal defeat for the company. In that case, the DOJ is reportedly seeking the forced sale of Google Chrome, the world’s most widely used browser.

The combined pressure threatens to fracture Google’s tightly integrated business model and potentially unravel its influence over billions of daily online interactions.

The DOJ’s offensive also dovetails with a global trend: regulators in the European Union, United Kingdom, India, and Australia have taken increasingly aggressive stances against tech monopolies, often targeting the same market structures Google relies on. Notably, EU regulators have previously levied multi-billion-euro fines on Google for antitrust violations involving search bias, Android dominance, and Google Shopping.

In 2022, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched a similar investigation into Google’s ad tech practices, examining its vertical integration and market dominance. And in France, Google was fined for self-preferencing its own advertising services at the expense of competitors. Currently, Google is facing a £5 billion ($6.6 billion) class action lawsuit in the United Kingdom, on the allegation of exploiting its “near-total dominance” in the online search market to inflate advertising prices.

If the DOJ succeeds in breaking up Google’s ad business, it will mark a turning point in global digital regulation. For years, critics have accused U.S. authorities of being too lenient, allowing corporate consolidation to hollow out competition and endanger democratic norms. Now, with bipartisan support in Congress for tech reform and mounting judicial wins, that tide appears to be turning.

But Google has made clear it intends to appeal the original antitrust ruling, and the court is not obligated to accept either party’s proposed remedy. This means a drawn-out legal battle seems inevitable. However, even the prospect of forced divestiture, or structural reform, sends a powerful message to Silicon Valley and the broader business world: the era of hands-off antitrust may be coming to an end.

Analysts believe the implications will reverberate through the entire tech ecosystem if courts uphold the DOJ’s remedy and force a Google breakup. It is also expected to embolden regulators to pursue similar action against Amazon’s logistics arm, Meta’s ad targeting system, or Apple’s App Store dominance.