Another Google Court Loss: Federal Judge Orders Tech Giant to Change Its Ad Practices After Ruling It Ran Illegal Monopoly

Google received another public flogging in federal court on Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, ordered Google to stop the conduct that has been strangling revenue from web publishers for years — the latest blow in the government’s antitrust case against the tech giant’s advertising empire.

This follows Brinkema’s ruling last year that Google violated US antitrust laws by unlawfully maintaining monopoly power in open web display advertising. It was the SECOND time a federal judge ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in part of its business, after Judge Amit Mehta found the same thing in online search.

Google is a monopolist. The courts confirmed this again.

The Department of Justice announced its victory in their case in April 2025:

“This is a landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “This Department of Justice will continue taking bold legal action to protect the American people from encroachments on free speech and free markets by tech companies.”

Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater went even further in the same DOJ statement:

“The Court’s ruling is clear: Google is a monopolist and has abused its monopoly power. Google’s unlawful dominance allows them to censor and even deplatform American voices. And at the same time, Google destroyed and hid information that exposed its illegal conduct. Today’s opinion confirms Google’s controlling hand over online advertising and, increasingly, the internet itself.”

Google censors and deplatforms American voices. The DOJ said it clear and out loud.

Here’s what the case was about… Google controlled BOTH sides of the online advertising market. It owned the platforms publishers use to sell ad space, the platforms advertisers use to buy it, AND the AdX exchange where the transactions happen — while pocketing a 20 percent fee.

Government lawyers even recounted how a senior Google executive once compared the setup to Goldman Sachs owning the New York Stock Exchange.

Historically, Google has taken a cut of over 30 cents on the dollar for every advert that passes through the system.

On Wednesday, Judge Brinkema, in a two-page order, declined to force Google to sell off the AdX exchange. But she ordered “behavioral remedies” — a set of rules governing how Google must operate — and will publish the full details in 14 days. She indicated she accepted “most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies.”

The Daily Mail reported on the testimony from publishers who were bled dry by Google’s scheme:

“Google suppressing prices for publishers ultimately reduces publisher revenue which, in turn, means we do not invest in journalism in a way that we potentially otherwise could,” Matthew Wheatland, the Daily Mail’s Chief Digital Officer, told the court at the time.

The DOJ said it was “pleased that the court ordered substantial relief” and added: “We are one step closer to restoring competition and bringing relief for the American people in online advertising markets. The Department is evaluating appropriate next steps.”

Google, of course, spun the ruling as a win because the court didn’t break the company apart, and it says it will appeal.

But Google’s troubles are far from over. Last year, the European Commission fined the company €2.95 billion ($3.5 billion) over its ad tech practices in an EU shakedown. A trial in Texas over its digital advertising practices was paused pending the outcome in Virginia.

And publishers and competitors are moving ahead with their own lawsuits seeking financial damages.

Two federal judges. Two illegal monopolies. And Big Tech’s grip on the digital public square is finally being pried loose — one ruling at a time.

As a reminder… Google de-monetized The Gateway Pundit in 2021.

Years ago, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, led by British far-left activist Imran Ahmed, put The Gateway Pundit high on their list to persecute, smear, and put out of business.

Imran said this during testimony before the UK Parliament in September 2021, when he bragged about working for over a year to push Google to demonetize The Gateway Pundit.

Imran Ahmed: Another problem with the Bill is that it does not deal with the advertising market. Google has two parts to its advertising business. The first part is a display network and websites.

Google has about a third of all additional ad revenue, but 95% of the sites that you ever see that have ads on them have ads placed there by Google.

Google has chosen breadth over expense. They have an enormous display network and they gobble up sites and put them in there, including Gateway Pundit, which was spreading election misinformation—“The Big Lie”—Covid disinformation, and all sorts of malignant and anti-black narratives (what?), really horrific racist nonsense.

We found that, thanks to Google ads monetisation—Google takes advertising revenue from everywhere; I think we found Democratic Party adverts placed on Gateway Pundit, a viciously far right site, which just goes to show that, even for the advertiser, it is a terrible waste of money, and most of them are utterly frustrated when they find out about it—Google has become a primary funder of malignant, violent, racist, anti-Semitic, and Covid disinformation content on the internet.

I can give you an example of a site I first heard about through the Home Office’s counterterrorism office and which we targeted last year. It was covered in adverts for household brands.

We contacted each of those brands and got all their adverts taken off, and the site shut down after the ads disappeared. It just goes to show you that the advertising revenue from Google is vital to the proselytisation of hatred in our society.

Counterterrorism told us that they were concerned about it. Gateway Pundit raised millions of dollars of revenue from Google ads—$1.1 million in just seven months.

I am very proud to tell you that after our campaign Stop Funding Misinformation, that story was featured in Forbes magazine in the USA.

I think it was last weekend when Google took them off their display network after a year of campaigning by CCDH, and they are now demonetised, which means that they will not be able to spread their nonsense any further or at the scale and speed at which they were able to before. That is another thing that I am very proud of my team for.

There is even video of this Imran Ahmed’s testimony before the UK Parliament about how glad he was to push Google to demonetize The Gateway Pundit after a year of campaigning Google to do so.

Here is the Imran testimony—via Bad Kitty:

But that’s not all.

America First Legal revealed in March 2024 that Joe Biden was paying radical foreign operatives to target American websites like The Gateway Pundit.

America First Legal discovered that the Biden regime was funding Imran Ahmed and his UK-based censorship group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

Imran Ahmed’s group targeted American independent news organizations like The Gateway Pundit, Zero Hedge, Breitbart, The Federalist and several others.

From the day it took power, the Biden Administration mobilized the national security state to support its censorship program. On June 15, 2021, Biden’s National Security Council published its first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

To justify censorship, Biden’s strategy asserted that “Internet-based communications platforms” make Americans “vulnerab[le] to domestic terrorist recruitment and other harmful content.” Effectively, the Biden Administration turned to the national security state and its allied technology companies to censor political opponents. In Orwellian fashion, it said: “All told, a better, more holistic, and coordinated understanding of and information sharing on today’s threat will allow a more effective and comprehensive response. That response will address not just current and imminent incarnations of the domestic terrorism threat but also its contributing factors before they can generate still more violence in the future.”

Google then banned The Gateway Pundit and several conservative sites for non-aligned thinking.
Maybe some day they will face consequences for actively denying their online ad catalogue to conservative websites.

A few more court wins may do the trick.

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