Google escapes ad tech breakup in third Big Tech antitrust loss for US
The judge accepted behavioral remedies. She will release a detailed ruling in 14 days to give time to redact confidential information. Google had proposed fixes including providing real-time bid access to competitors.
The ruling fueled questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry's unprecedented power over the U.S. economy, and the fate of a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump's first term. Cases against Amazon and Apple involving smartphone and online retail markets have not yet gone to trial. And while two judges found Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct in separate markets, they rejected the strongest measure of requiring it to sell assets.
AdX is a small part of Google's business. Google shares pared gains slightly after the ruling and were up 0.6 per cent.
Google welcomed the court decision. "We’re very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ's proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow," said executive Lee-Anne Mulholland.
The DOJ is "pleased that the court ordered substantial relief," it said in a social media post on X.
In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found.
The tech giant'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.
At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior.
Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. The company also sought to show the DOJ's demand was different from Google's own previous offer to sell AdX to end an EU antitrust investigation, which Reuters reported in 2024.
Ad Manager represented 4.1 per cent of Google's overall revenue and 1.5 per cent of operating profit in 2020, according to Wedbush research and analysis of court documents. More recent figures were redacted from court documents.
While Google has been ordered to change some business practices, the ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech.
A federal judge in Washington last year rejected the Federal Trade Commission's attempt to make Meta Platforms sell off Instagram and WhatsApp, saying the agency failed to prove that Meta holds a monopoly in a social media landscape that has shifted drastically since the case was brought in 2020. The FTC has filed an appeal.
Likewise, another judge in Washington, who previously ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly in online search, rejected the DOJ's bid to make the company sell its Chrome browser, citing rising competition from generative artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.
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