Brinkema rejects the US demand to break up Google Ad Manager, opting for interoperability remedies that critics say leave a twice-confirmed monopoly intact.

Google will not have to sell its advertising exchange, a federal judge ruled on September 2, rejecting the Justice Department’s bid to force a divestiture and sparing the company a second attempt to break up one of its businesses. In a short preview filing, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia turned down the government’s request that Google sell AdX, its sell-side exchange, and instead ordered the company to change how it operates the market.

The decision follows an April 2025 ruling in which Brinkema found that Google had illegally monopolized two markets: the exchange where publisher ad inventory is auctioned and the ad server publishers use to manage it. The DOJ had asked the court to unwind that dominance structurally, seeking a sale of AdX and, potentially, the DoubleClick for Publishers server that Google bundles with it as Google Ad Manager.

Brinkema declined. She ordered Google to adopt most of the behavioral remedies the parties had put forward, requiring the company to make its ad tools interoperable with rivals and to stop practices that suppress the rates publishers earn. The full opinion was issued under seal, with a redacted version expected later this month.

The remedies now on the table are largely ones Google proposed itself. The company had offered to make real-time bids from AdX available to competing ad servers, to deprecate its Unified Pricing Rules so publishers can set different price floors for individual bidders, and to abandon the “first look” and “last look” auction privileges that let it see or beat competing bids. Google has said it stopped using those privileges years ago.

For the DOJ, which argued last autumn that a forced sale would be a “cleaner, less risky” solution, the outcome is a setback. Government lawyers had told the court Google could not be trusted to comply with conduct rules. Google’s counsel countered in a filing that distrust “is not a lever to bypass well-settled antitrust principles.”

Critics who wanted structural relief were unconvinced by the alternative. Jay Friedman, a former Goodway Group chief executive who testified for the government, said the ruling failed to answer how a publisher could switch to a rival ad server while still tapping Google’s buy-side demand. Others in the ad tech industry were readier to wait and see. PubMatic, which runs a competing supply-side platform, said the court’s focus on behavioral remedies “should establish a level playing field” and offered “a more expeditious path” than a divestiture tied up in years of appeals.

The pattern is now familiar. In August 2024, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in online search, then stopped short of forcing a sale of Chrome or Android, ordering the company to share some search data with competitors instead. Twice found to be an unlawful monopolist, Google has twice avoided losing a business.

The parties have been ordered to meet and file a joint proposed final judgment within 30 days, or to submit competing proposals if they cannot agree. Any structural fight, if it revives, would come on appeal.

Sources