The Justice Department laid out its road map on Friday to break up Google’s advertising technology empire, which would be the second request to force the sale of pieces of its business within a year.
The government’s comments came during a hearing convened by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, who ruled last month that Google had a monopoly over some portions of a sprawling system that places ads on websites. She now has to decide what measures, known as remedies, she should take to resolve her concerns.
A lawyer for the Justice Department said the government expected to ask the court to force Google to divest tools used by online publishers to sell ad space, as well as the technology that connects those publishers with advertisers looking to buy space. In the original lawsuit, the government had asked the court to force Google to sell ad technology it had acquired over the years.
To leave Google with “90 percent of publishers beholden to them is, frankly, too dangerous,” said Julia Tarver Wood, the government’s lead lawyer in the case.
Google’s lawyers said a breakup wouldn’t align with earlier legal precedent and would imperil privacy and security protections.
The Justice Department’s request is the latest legal blow to Google, which is also in the midst of a second hearing on how to remedy its monopoly over search in a federal court in Washington. In that case, the government has asked a judge to force the company to sell its popular browser, Chrome, along with other measures.
Combined, the two government requests — if granted — would most likely represent the biggest reshaping of a powerful company by the federal government since the 1980s, when AT&T split into multiple companies as part of an antitrust settlement with the Justice Department.
It remains to be seen if the judges will force a breakup, viewed among antitrust experts as the most extreme solution.
In the ad tech case, which was filed in 2023, government lawyers argued that Google had dominated the mostly invisible technology that delivers ads to websites around the internet. That system runs an auction for open ad space on a website, like a news publisher’s, in real time as the page loads.
The government argued that Google had illegally monopolized three parts of that system: tools that websites used to post their open ad space, tools used by advertisers to purchase it and the software that connected the two sides of each transaction.
Judge Brinkema ruled last month that Google had broken the law to protect its monopoly over the publisher tools and the software that connects buyers with sellers of ad space, known as an ad exchange. The government did not prove Google was a monopolist when it came to the tools used by advertisers, she added.
At Friday’s hearing, Judge Brinkema said she would convene a hearing to determine the remedies in September.
To resolve its concerns, the Justice Department said, it plans to ask the judge to force Google to sell its ad exchange, which facilitates transactions between buyers and sellers of ad space.
The government will also seek the breakup of Google’s publisher ad tools by spinning off a portion of them that runs auctions for ad space, making its underlying coding open to the public. Later, the government wants Google to sell the tools that handle other functions for publishers, like record keeping.
Google’s lead lawyer, Karen Dunn, said the plan would not comply with legal precedent. Even if the court seriously considered breaking up Google’s ad technology business, the government’s proposal would be challenging, she added.
Few buyers would exist for the technology, and the ones that could afford it are “enormous tech companies,” Ms. Dunn added. Plus, important security and privacy protections provided by Google would disappear.
“It is very likely completely impossible, what they’re talking about,” without causing serious problems, she said.
Google has instead proposed that the court require the company to change or abandon some of the practices the government said it used to cement its power, and said it would take steps to open up its ad auction bidding system in ways that would benefit publishers.
