The Same Diagnosis, Different Prescription
On September 2, 2026, Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia rejected the Department of Justice's push to force Google to divest its AdX ad exchange, ruling in United States v. Google LLC (No. 1:23-cv-108) that structural remedies — including divestiture of AdX and open-sourcing DoubleClick for Publishers' auction logic — "be and are REJECTED." She accepted behavioral remedies instead, and when the sealed opinion was released on September 16, it set a six-year, worldwide conduct regime with a monitor and technical committee, effective 60 days after entry, rather than a breakup (TechCrunch; Digital Applied).
Canada's Competition Bureau is not taking the hint. Its application before the Competition Tribunal, filed November 28, 2024, seeks a broader version of what Brinkema declined to order: forced divestiture of Google's publisher ad server (DFP) and its ad exchange (AdX), on top of a penalty of three times the benefit Google derived or 3% of its worldwide gross revenue (Competition Bureau backgrounder).
What the Bureau Is Actually Alleging
The Bureau's case isn't thin. It alleges Google tied its ad tech tools together, gave its own products preferential access to inventory, took losses on some auctions specifically to disadvantage rival platforms, and dictated how publishers could work with competitors — conduct the Bureau says entrenched dominance across the stack: 90% share in publisher ad servers, 70% in advertiser networks, 60% in demand-side platforms, and 50% in ad exchanges, with over 200 billion Canadian web ad transactions running through Google's tools in 2022 alone.
Google fought back with a constitutional challenge, arguing the potential penalty — which it calculated could reach roughly $91 billion by applying 3% to its cumulative 2008–2024 global revenue — amounted to a "true penal consequence" requiring Charter protections. The Tribunal dismissed that argument on March 3–4, 2026, calling the $91 billion figure "hypothetical at best" (ppc.land; Competition Bureau statement). The case now proceeds under a bifurcated structure — liability first, remedy only if liability is found — with no trial date yet set (PYMNTS).
Steelmanning the Breakup Case
The argument for structural relief isn't frivolous, and this publication should say so plainly. Ad tech is a genuine vertical-integration problem: Google sits on the buy side, the sell side, and the exchange that matches them, a configuration that would draw scrutiny in almost any other financial market. Behavioral remedies require years of monitoring, technical committees, and litigation over compliance edge cases — exactly the kind of drawn-out enforcement that lets a dominant firm out-lawyer a regulator's finite budget. Regulators reasonably worry that conduct rules invite narrow, technical compliance that preserves the underlying economics of self-preferencing. If the concern is a structurally conflicted market, a structural fix has an obvious appeal that a conduct injunction does not.
Why Ottawa Should Still Hesitate
But Brinkema's ruling isn't background noise — it's the outcome of the most exhaustive adversarial test of this kind of remedy anywhere in the world, on a record built from years of discovery in the market where Google's ad tech business is largest. Her court concluded that dismantling AdX and DFP was disproportionate to the violation and opted for a monitored, time-limited conduct regime instead. Canada's ad tech market is a fraction of the size of the US market the DOJ litigated. A Canada-specific divestiture would require carving out a bespoke instance of globally-integrated infrastructure for a market that generated a small share of the revenue at issue in the US case — raising real questions about whether a viable buyer exists for Canada-only ad tech assets, and whether Canadian publishers and advertisers would be better served by a functioning, if imperfect, global system than a jury-rigged domestic one.
There is also a coordination cost regulators should weigh honestly: when enforcers in the world's largest ad market and a much smaller one reach opposite structural conclusions on the same conduct, the divergence itself becomes a variable Google can litigate for years, as it is already doing with its Charter challenge. Proportionate, evidence-based regulation — this publication's standing position — doesn't mean copying whichever jurisdiction moved first. But it does mean treating a full trial record from a comparable market as evidence, not noise, particularly when the remedy in question is the one a well-resourced antitrust court just spent months testing and declined to impose.
The Sensible Middle Path
The Bureau doesn't need to abandon its case to take this seriously. Liability has not yet been determined in Canada, and nothing stops the Tribunal from finding abuse of dominance while reaching for the interoperability and anti-self-preferencing conduct rules Brinkema just finalized — remedies that address the entrenchment the Bureau's own backgrounder describes without betting Canadian publishers' ad infrastructure on an unproven domestic breakup. Watching how Brinkema's six-year regime performs before Ottawa commits to a harder remedy is not deference to Google; it's proportionality applied consistently.