The Invisible Stranglehold: How Google’s Ad Monopoly Finally Met Its Match

In a rare blow to Big Tech impunity, a federal judge finds Google guilty of rigging the ad game, exposing the decade-long shell game that suffocated the open web. Even Trump’s DOJ couldn’t save them.

For more than a decade, Google quietly but methodically rigged the digital advertising game. Now, a federal judge has finally called it what it is: an illegal monopoly. In a sweeping 115-page decision, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema found that Google willfully manipulated the markets for publisher ad servers and ad exchanges, two critical layers of the online ad economy, violating antitrust law in ways that harmed not just competitors, but publishers and everyday consumers alike.

Brinkema laid out, with surgical clarity, how Google deliberately tied its products together, withheld features that would have leveled the playing field, and created a self-reinforcing loop that guaranteed dominance. It was, in essence, a digital shell game: publishers were told they had a choice, but behind the curtain, Google was the house, the dealer, and the pit boss. And the game was fixed.

What makes this ruling even more extraordinary is the fact that it happened at all under a second Trump administration that has otherwise gutted regulatory oversight, weaponized federal agencies against critics, and bent policy to the will of the highest bidder. Let’s not forget: a senior Google executive attended Trump’s second inauguration, rubbing elbows with oligarchs and powerbrokers, presumably confident that proximity to power and a $1 million donation was an insurance policy against federal heat.

If anything, this case is proof that sometimes the wheels of justice grind slowly but relentlessly. The antitrust action was originally launched under Biden’s DOJ, helmed by Jonathan Kanter, who has been doggedly pursuing Big Tech’s structural abuses. This case didn’t survive because it fit the Trump agenda, it survived because the evidence was too overwhelming, too well-documented, and too damaging to brush aside. Google wasn’t just playing hardball. It was crushing rivals with the bat, then blaming the injuries on “market efficiencies.”

Even the judge’s handling of Google’s evidentiary misconduct, where she noted the company’s destruction of documents and misuse of attorney-client privilege, underscores how deeply the company believed it was untouchable. That she didn’t need to issue sanctions because the remaining evidence was already damning says everything about how badly Google overplayed its hand.

This ruling now joins the earlier DOJ victory over Google’s search monopoly, where the government is seeking to force the company to sell off Chrome. The message is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: Google’s business empire has been built not merely on innovation, but on a decade of calculated, anticompetitive behavior. Now, for the first time in years, that foundation is cracking under real legal scrutiny.

The irony? As Trump continues to berate the “deep state” and pretend to be a warrior against corporate tyranny, his administration is presiding over perhaps the most meaningful antitrust decision in a generation. Not because it aligns with Trump’s philosophy, he doesn’t have one, but because the case was too airtight, too far along, and too public to be buried without consequence.

Google thought it had bought itself protection. What it bought instead was a front-row seat to its own reckoning.

The real question now is what the remedy will be. Will the courts order Google to divest part of its ad business, break up the vertical integration, or impose structural constraints that finally give publishers and advertisers a fair shake? And will this mark a true shift toward meaningful antitrust enforcement, or just a one-off aberration in an administration otherwise drunk on corporate power?

Whatever comes next, the open web didn’t die quietly. It was strangled by the invisible hands of monopoly, and now, finally, someone is calling it murder.