The Google ad tech antitrust ruling handed down this week may finally mark the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley exceptionalism. Or, at least, that’s what the United States Department of Justice would like you to believe. In a lengthy, meticulously detailed opinion, Judge Leonie Brinkema found that Google had illegally monopolised key parts of the online advertising market — cornering both supply and demand like a casino that not only owns the poker table, but also sells the chips and deals the cards.
It’s a rare judicial takedown of a tech giant that usually floats above regulation, swaddled in lobbyists and PR gloss. The decision calls for a forced divestiture of Google’s ad business — specifically its ad exchange and ad server — an unthinkable scenario a decade ago. It’s as though the regulatory gods have finally woken up from a long nap, looked around, and noticed one company has been quietly running the financial plumbing of the internet.
And yet, if you squint, this isn’t the full unravelling of a monopoly — it’s a haircut. Google will appeal. The legal wrangling could drag on for years. In the meantime, advertisers, publishers, and regulators are stuck in a liminal space where Google is both chastened and unchanged, a trillion-dollar paradox.
For an industry fuelled by frictionless data flows and opaque algorithms, this moment introduces a rare jolt of friction. The court’s ruling, in effect, says the quiet part out loud: that Google’s dominance wasn’t just the result of clever engineering or user preference, but a carefully constructed walled garden fortified with market manipulation. At one point, the ruling cites internal Google documents describing its strategy as being akin to “Project Niro” — an internal joke referring to the Roman emperor who fiddled while Rome burned.
The sardonic metaphor fits. Google wasn’t merely competing; it was orchestrating. The court found that the company strategically acquired rivals like DoubleClick and AdMeld not for innovation, but for neutralisation. It offered preferential treatment to its own tools and manipulated auctions to favour its bottom line, all while claiming to stand for openness and fairness.
In another time, the remedy might have been a regulatory slap on the wrist. But the post-Cambridge Analytica, post-ChatGPT, post-everything internet is tired of performative accountability. The DOJ’s proposed remedy is structural: spin off key pieces of Google’s ad business. Not regulate it. Not fine it. Dismantle it.
Still, the question remains: what fills the vacuum? Breaking up a monopoly doesn’t automatically create a healthy market. If anything, the ad tech landscape may simply re-congeal under different gatekeepers. Amazon, Meta, and TikTok are already eyeing slices of the advertising pie with the same algorithmic appetite. And OpenAI — recently rumoured to be exploring its own ad platform — hovers like an ideological wildcard.
This isn’t just a story about Google losing; it’s about what the internet becomes when the default infrastructure starts to collapse. A less dominant Google could mean more competition, yes — but it could also mean a digital Wild West where power is more fragmented, more experimental, and possibly even more dangerous.
That’s the thing about finally calling a monopoly a monopoly: it raises the terrifying possibility that the alternative might not be liberation, but entropy.