Brussels said only a breakup would fix Google’s ad tech. The judge who agreed on liability has just declined to order one.

Judge Leonie Brinkema declined to order Google to divest parts of its advertising business, leaving the European Commission the only regulator still arguing that a breakup is the fix. A year after its €2.95bn fine, the Commission is still assessing a compliance plan Google filed in November 2025, and the complainants who brought the case privately say they no longer expect a divestiture.

Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the US Department of Justice’s request to force Google to sell parts of its advertising business on Wednesday, in the remedies phase of the case where she had already found the company liable in April 2025. Jacob Parry reported for Politico that the decision leaves the European Commission isolated in pressing for a structural remedy.

The Commission fined Google €2.95bn a year ago for monopolising digital advertising and said at the time that divestment appeared to be the only way to resolve the conflict of interest. Brinkema, reviewing the same conduct, concluded a structural divestment was not necessary to remedy the liability she had found.

Why one market cannot sell half a company

The obstacle is mechanical before it is political. Google’s buying tools, its selling tools and the exchange sitting between them operate as a single global system, so an order issued in Brussels would apply on one side of the Atlantic to a business whose largest advertisers and publishers do not stop at the EU border.

The Commission has acknowledged the difficulty. Structural remedies where parties have already completed investment activities are “of course very difficult and can be politically contested”, DG Competition director general Anthony Whelan said at a conference in Florence, adding that this is a hard case irrespective of transatlantic relations.

That is a notably softer position than the one the Commission took last September. The US ruling removed the parallel proceeding Brussels had been able to point to.

The complainants have already moved on

The most telling detail in Politico’s reporting is not the Commission’s position but the plaintiffs’. Several people involved in the complaint said privately they no longer see a viable route to carving out and selling part of a US company’s business within Europe alone.

“There was such an expectation that breakup was going to change the world. It was never going to change the world,” said Tim Cowen of Preiskel & Co, who represents a complainant, telling Politico the critical issue is non-discrimination.

That is a substantial retreat from the people with the most to gain from a divestiture. It suggests the fight is moving from ownership to conduct rules, which is the terrain Google has always preferred.

What Google offered instead

Google submitted a compliance plan in November 2025 proposing changes to how its tools work rather than a sale. The Commission granted itself an extension in March to assess the proposal in depth, and is still assessing it.

Google is appealing the Commission’s decision at the EU’s General Court and said it was very pleased with the US ruling. Waiting has a cost that accrues to one side only.

Campaigners put a number on it, if a loose one. A coalition including People vs Big Tech, LobbyControl and the Balanced Economy Project calculates Google’s EU revenues at €288m a day since the ruling, drawn from filings in 19 member states compiled by the Media and Journalism Research Center, though that figure covers Google’s entire EU business rather than advertising alone.

The argument for holding the line

Not everyone accepts that a US ruling should determine European enforcement. Max von Thun of the Open Markets Institute told Politico the Commission should show global leadership by imposing structural remedies rather than following what he called a misguided decision.

He also made the sharper criticism, which is about timing rather than substance: that the Commission has had authority to act independently all along and should have done so long ago. Arielle Garcia of Check My Ads argued that as long as Google keeps the incentive and the means, it has endless paths to comparable anti-competitive outcomes.

The counter-argument is that an unenforceable order is worse than a narrower enforceable one. A divestiture Brussels cannot deliver would invite years of appeal and hand Google the timeline.

The trade dimension nobody can ignore

This is not being decided in a vacuum. The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened tariffs over EU actions against American tech companies, and opened a trade investigation a day after Brussels fined Google under its digital rulebook.

Whelan’s insistence that the case is difficult irrespective of transatlantic relations is the kind of thing officials say when relations are precisely the issue. Brussels has been recalibrating how hard it pushes on US technology enforcement across several files.

Andreas Schwab, a German centre-right MEP, put it more bluntly, telling Politico the conflicts of interest remain a year on and the Commission keeps giving Google more time to extend its market power.

Where this actually lands

Non-discrimination rules are the likely destination, and they are not nothing. They are also the remedy that requires continuous supervision of a system regulators cannot see inside, which is the same problem showing up elsewhere in advertising.

The FTC’s case against Amazon’s ad auction turns on whether advertisers were told how prices were set. Both cases end in the same place: proving conduct has been easier than agreeing what to do about it.

Antitrust action against the digital advertising stack keeps arriving at this wall, and a year of Commission deliberation has produced an extension rather than a decision.

The Commission says it continues the investigation as a matter of priority and stands ready to hear from civil society. It has moved faster elsewhere against Google, which is why the ad tech file is starting to look like a choice rather than a delay.