A US judge has spared Google from selling its advertising exchange, AdX, rejecting the Justice Department’s move to break up the company’s ad-tech business. Instead, it will have to change how its ad-tech products operate, including requiring them to work with rival platforms.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued the ruling on Wednesday, along with a brief order denying the government’s demand for a forced sale of Google’s AdX exchange.
For now, the court has not disclosed what changes Google will have to make. A redacted version of the full decision will be released soon.
A ruling in April 2025 found that the company had illegally dominated two parts of the digital advertising market. The Justice Department had also asked Brinkema to compel Google to disclose the system it uses to decide which ads appear on websites.
However, the new order means that Google will not have to sell the business.
“Most of the parties’ proposed behavioural remedies, as modified by this court, are accepted,” Brinkema wrote in her order. The full decision with redactions will be released later this month.
Google shares were up less than 1% at $337.76 at 10:30 a.m. in New York.
Companies will spend more than $919.6 billion globally on digital advertising, according to estimates by research firm EMarketer, making the industry one of the largest segments of the broader tech economy.
Google’s ad tech stack sits between publishers selling display space and advertisers bidding on it, giving the company a powerful position in setting prices and determining which ads appear. Regulators have long argued that controlling both the dominant publisher ad server and one of the largest ad exchanges allowed Google to advantage its own systems at multiple points in the process.
The Justice Department could still appeal the ruling, and Google continues to face scrutiny from state attorneys general, private plaintiffs and European regulators over its advertising practices. The pace and scope of Google’s implementation will likely determine whether the remedy produces meaningful competitive shifts in the display ad market
The decision is a win for Google, which avoided a breakup in the Justice Department’s first antitrust case over its monopoly in the online search market. There, a federal judge in Washington ruled that Google doesn’t have to sell off its popular Chrome web browser and instead must make some of the data underlying its search results available to rivals.
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