Google avoided a forced sale of its online ad marketplace, AdX, after Judge Leonie Brinkema declined to impose a divestiture and signed off on most of the behavioral remedies the parties proposed. The exchange is a relatively small slice of Google's overall operations, but the outcome is a second notable symbolic win against the Justice Department's push to make Google shed assets to address alleged illegal monopolies.
Brinkema had already ruled in April 2025 that Google maintained illegal monopolies over publisher ad servers and the ad exchanges that connect ad buyers and sellers. She concluded Google unlawfully tied publishers on its ad server to AdX, and said the company's anticompetitive behavior "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web."
AdX runs split-second auctions when a webpage loads, and publishers using it pay Google a 20% cut to sell ads through the marketplace.
At the remedies trial, the Justice Department argued Google should not be allowed to keep running AdX because of its past conduct. Google responded that forcing a sale would be technically intricate and would lead to a prolonged changeover harmful to customers. The company also pointed out that the DOJ's request was not the same as Google's earlier proposal to sell AdX to resolve an EU antitrust probe, which Reuters reported in 2024.
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Court records and Wedbush analysis show that in 2020 Google's Ad Manager products accounted for 4.1% of the company's total revenue and 1.5% of operating profit. More recent figures in the filings were blacked out.
The DOJ and a broad group of states first sued in 2023, targeting Google's dominance in the ad tech used by online publishers and websites.
This is the third straight instance where a judge has turned down U.S. enforcers seeking to break up a major tech company in a crackdown that began during President Donald Trump's first term. Last year, a federal judge in Washington rejected the FTC's effort to force Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, finding the agency had not proven a monopoly in a social media market that had changed significantly since 2020. Another Washington judge, who had earlier found Google held an unlawful monopoly in online search, denied the DOJ's request to force the sale of Chrome, pointing to growing competition from generative AI players like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Cases against Amazon and Apple that cover large online retail and smartphone markets are not slated for trial until at least 2027. Translation for your wallet: any court-ordered shakeups to Big Tech business models are likely years away, which means the legal overhang is real, but the timing is anything but immediate.