Google lost the case and kept the business

There is something in your business that everyone knows is not right, and it is still running. A contract nobody wants to reopen. An agency that stopped being good two years ago. Not because nobody noticed. Because somebody did the sum in a corridor and stopping cost more than carrying on.

Nobody wrote that sum down. So next quarter it gets made again, the same way, by nobody in particular.

On 2 September a federal judge refused the Department of Justice's request to break up Google's ad-tech business, the AdX exchange and the DFP ad server.

The same judge ruled in April 2025 that Google had illegally monopolised those markets. She ordered behavioural changes instead, and the terms are sealed. Google called it a win.

A court found the conduct illegal and then decided the cure would cost more than the disease. Which, if you are Google, is the right outcome and you would take it every single day of the week.

We do the same thing on a smaller scale. We pay for tools we have not properly compared in a year. Every time the invoice lands we consider switching, then we work out that moving would cost us two days we do not have, so we renew. Nobody makes us do that.

We did the sum and the sum said renew. The only difference with Google is that a judge wrote their version down and made them stand behind it in public.

Nobody does that for the rest of us. The sum gets made by committee and then it is gone, so next year the same committee produces the same answer.

Each one of those is defensible. Ten of them in a row is a company that has not changed anything in three years, because every single decision along the way felt like the right one, in the moment.

The question is not whether Google should hold this much power. It is how many of your renewals have ever been decided, rather than just repeated.