yahoo Press
Google Was Found to Hold an Illegal Monopoly and Kept It Anyway. Is the Antitrust Nightmare Finally Over?
Images
The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational. A federal judge denied the DOJ's forced AdX sale, preserving the monopoly finding but sending GOOGL higher as structural breakup risk fades. At P/E 15, GOOGL trades at a steep discount to META and MSFT while 58 analysts set a $428 price target. The pending search remedy covering $63 billion in Q2 revenue remains the primary risk the ad-tech ruling did not address. Just released. Our analysts combed the entire stock market and named the ten best stocks to buy right now. The report is free. Enter your email and see if any of your stocks made the cut. A federal judge rejected the Justice Department's bid to force Google to sell its AdX advertising exchange, even after finding the company illegally monopolized the publisher ad-server and ad-exchange markets. The liability finding stands, while the structural remedy was denied. Shares of Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL) responded in kind, with Barron's noting that Alphabet rose as Google avoided another attempt at a business breakup. The detailed remedies remain temporarily under seal, and the DOJ is still weighing its next moves, so the shape of what Google will actually live under is not yet public. The court declined the divestiture the government sought, but the monopoly finding is intact and behavioral restrictions are coming. An ad exchange is the auction house where publishers sell impressions to advertisers in real time; a publisher ad server decides which ad wins. Google owned both sides of that transaction, and that was the conduct the court condemned. Reuters reports the case now heads into a compliance regime with an appeal path still open. Free Report, Just Released Did Any of Your Stocks Make the Top 10 List? It is an uncomfortable question, and there is now an answer to it. 24/7 Wall St has helped investors make money for over two decades, and our top analysts just finished ranking the definitive Top 10 Stocks To Buy Now. Not the ten biggest companies. Not the ten everyone is arguing about. The ten best stocks to buy right now. Open your account and look at what you own. Some of it you bought for a reason you could still defend today. Some of it you bought years ago for a reason you can no longer remember. The report is free. Put the ten next to what you own and find out which is which. Enter Your Email and See the Ten → Free from 24/7 Wall St. It lands in your inbox. Google Network revenue was $7.303 billion in Q2 2026, a rounding line next to Google Services at $94.54 billion and Cloud at $24.77 billion, up 82%. That is exactly why the divestiture threat was never the real drag on the equity. The ad-tech stack matters because it feeds identity, measurement, and pricing data into the rest of advertising, and behavioral remedies will constrain how those pieces talk to each other. Behavioral remedies still carry a cost, though. Living under a court-supervised consent structure means monitors, disclosures, and product decisions that route through lawyers. It slows integration work at a time when Sundar Pichai says, "Gemini models now process 22 billion API tokens per minute and the Gemini App has 950 million monthly active users." Compliance friction is a tax on speed, and speed is what the AI cycle rewards, which is also why the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind the data centers keep showing up in our free report on seven AI infrastructure names that are not chipmakers. Judge Amit Mehta's separate finding that Google illegally monopolized search still awaits its own remedy conclusion. Search & other delivered $63.27 billion in Q2 2026. That is the figure most exposed to the ongoing search remedy proceedings. This week's ruling does not touch it. At $337.12 and a P/E of 15x, Alphabet trades below Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) at roughly 22x, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) at 28x, and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) at 35x, while Cloud grew 82% and the one-year return sits at 59.96%. Analysts have 58 Buy ratings and 5 Hold ratings, with a target price of $428.07. The setup looks constructive on relative valuation. The ad-tech win is genuine; courts have now declined structural relief against Big Tech three times in recent years, and that pattern is worth more over a decade than any single exchange. The search remedy is still the risk to watch. If you have cash sitting in your account right now, give this two minutes. After more than two decades of helping investors beat the market, our top analysts at 24/7 Wall St. put together a definitive report on the Top 10 Stocks To Buy Today. They combed the entire market. It's not 10 ideas, not 10 stocks everyone is talking about, it's what their research point to as the 10 best stocks to buy right now, and it's free. Read more here and see which stocks made the cut -->> Contact editorial@247wallst.com for any questions or corrections.
Comments
You must be logged in to comment.