Google defeats the US Department of Justice’s attempt to force the sale of advertising technology | Google
Alphabet’s Google escaped the breakup of its ad technology business on Wednesday when a Virginia judge rejected US antitrust authorities’ attempt to force the sale of Google’s online advertising exchange.
While ad sharing is a small part of Google’s business, the ruling is the second powerful and symbolic victory against the US Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies.
U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, refused to force Google to sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that run instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the behavioral solutions proposed by the parties.
The Justice Department and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites.
In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google has illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges between buyers and sellers. Google illegally blocked publishers on its ad server from using its AdX, the judge concluded.
The tech company’s anticompetitive conduct “substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and ultimately consumers of information on the open web,” Brinkema said at the time.
In a trial last year on remedies in the case, the Justice Department argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior.
Google argued that a fire sale would be technically difficult and would result in a long and painful transition that would harm customers. The company also sought to show that the justice department’s demand was different from Google’s previous offer to sell AdX to end an EU antitrust investigation, which Reuters reported in 2024.
Ad Manager accounted for 4.1% of Google’s total revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020, according to Wedbush research and analysis of court documents. The most recent figures were redacted from court documents.
The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected an attempt by US antitrust authorities to dismantle Big Tech in an offensive that began during Donald Trump’s first term. It is likely to fuel doubts about whether the courts are up to the task of reining in the industry’s unprecedented power over the American economy.
Last year, a federal judge in Washington rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to get Meta Platforms to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, saying the agency failed to prove that Meta has a monopoly on a social media landscape that has changed dramatically since the case was filed in 2020.
Likewise, another Washington judge, who previously ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on online search, rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to force the company to sell its Chrome browser, citing growing competition from generative artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The US antitrust cases against Amazon and Apple, involving large online and smartphone retail markets, will not go to trial until 2027 at the earliest.
