Google keeps its ad exchange. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, turned down the Justice Department’s request to force a sale of AdX, the platform where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in instant auctions. She also declined to order the open-sourcing of the final auction logic in DoubleClick for Publishers.
What she did order was most of the behavioral remedies the two sides had proposed, “as modified by this court,” according to a short public order. Her reasoning sits in a sealed memorandum that stays sealed for 14 days.
How the case got here
The Justice Department and a group of states sued in 2023. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google held illegal monopolies over the servers that host publisher ads and over ad exchanges, and that it had unlawfully tied publishers on its ad server to AdX. Its conduct, she wrote then, “substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.”
The remedies trial ran in September 2025. Prosecutors argued Google could not be trusted to run AdX given its past conduct. Google said a forced sale would be technically hard and would mean a long, painful transition for customers. It also tried to show that the government’s demand differed from Google’s own earlier offer to sell AdX to settle a European Union investigation, which Reuters reported in 2024. During closing arguments late that year, Brinkema said Google would likely appeal.
Reaction
A Justice Department spokesperson said the Antitrust Division was “pleased that the court ordered substantial relief” and called the outcome “one step closer to restoring competition.” The department, the spokesperson added, is evaluating next steps.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, put it differently: “We’re very pleased the court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow.”
CNBC noted the ad exchange is a small part of Google’s business. Wedbush analysis of court documents put Ad Manager at 4.1% of Google’s revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020; newer figures were redacted.
What comes next
Within 30 days, lawyers for both sides must confer and file a single proposed final judgment. The order leaves room for more briefing or oral argument if they cannot agree.
The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has refused to break up a Big Tech company. A federal judge in Washington rejected the FTC’s attempt to make Meta sell Instagram and WhatsApp, and another turned down the DOJ’s bid to make Google sell Chrome in the search case.
Outside the courtroom, ad tech firm PubMatic sued Google in 2025 seeking over $1 billion in damages, and European regulators fined the company $3.2 billion over abuse of dominance in ad tech.
Sources
- Google defeats U.S. bid to force ad tech sale
- Google dodges antitrust breakup of ad tech business | Courthouse News Service
