Alphabet-owned Google avoided a court-ordered divestment of its advertising technology unit on Wednesday, after a federal judge located in Virginia dismissed an attempt by American antitrust regulators to compel the sale of its web advertising exchange.
Even though the ad exchange represents only a minor fraction of Google’s overall operations, the decision marks a second major symbolic triumph over the US Department of Justice as it seeks to force Google to divest core properties to remedy unlawful monopolies.
Presiding in Alexandria, Virginia, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema refused to mandate that Google offload AdX, the marketplace where site owners pay a 20% commission to Google to auction ad inventory in real time whenever web pages load. Instead, she approved the majority of the behavioral remedies submitted by the litigating parties.
The Department of Justice alongside an extensive coalition of US states initiated legal action against Google in 2023, targeting its market control over advertising technology systems utilized by web publishers and online sites.
During April 2025, Judge Brinkema determined that Google maintained unlawful monopoly power across publisher ad servers as well as the ad exchanges that connect ad buyers with sellers. The judge concluded that Google illegally tied publishers using its ad server to its AdX platform.
Brinkema noted then that the technology firm’s monopolistic practices “substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web”.
Throughout a remedies trial held last year, the Department of Justice maintained that Google’s historical track record proves it cannot be relied upon to oversee AdX fairly.
In defense, Google contended that an involuntary divestment would pose substantial technical hurdles, causing an arduous, protracted transition period that would damage client operations. Furthermore, the tech giant aimed to demonstrate that the Justice Department’s demands diverged from Google’s earlier proposal to divest AdX to resolve a European Union antitrust inquiry, as reported by Reuters back in 2024.
Ad Manager accounted for 4.1% of Google’s total revenues and 1.5% of its operating profits during 2020, based on research from Wedbush and examination of judicial records. More up-to-date financial metrics remained redacted in public legal filings.
This judgment represents the third consecutive occasion where a court has turned down an attempt by US antitrust authorities to dismantle Big Tech firms in an enforcement wave that originated during Donald Trump’s initial presidential term. The decision will likely intensify debate regarding whether the judicial branch is capable of constraining the tech sector’s unprecedented influence over the American economy.
Last year, a Washington federal judge dismissed an attempt by the Federal Trade Commission to compel Meta Platforms to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, ruling that regulators failed to demonstrate Meta’s monopoly power within a social media environment that underwent major transformations after the 2020 lawsuit filing.
Similarly, another federal judge in Washington who earlier established that Google maintained an illegal online search monopoly turned down a Department of Justice effort to force the sale of the Chrome web browser, pointing to intensifying rivalry from generative AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Additional American antitrust lawsuits directed at Amazon and Apple, covering substantial e-commerce and smartphone sectors, are not scheduled to proceed to trial before 2027 at the soonest.
Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/02/google-defeats-justice-department-bid-ad-tech-sale.
