Google’s advertising empire just dodged the break-up bullet for the second time. A federal judge in Virginia ruled on Wednesday that Alphabet does not have to sell its online ad exchange, AdX, rejecting the remedies the US justice department had demanded at the close of its landmark ad tech monopoly case. The Guardian, Bloomberg and Ars Technica reported the decision.
Judge Leonie Brinkema, based in Alexandria, instead accepted what she described as “most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies”, ordering Google to make some of its ad tools work more openly with rival systems. The full opinion is sealed for 14 days while the parties redact sensitive commercial detail, so the exact shape of the changes will not be public until later this month. The parties have 30 days to file a joint final judgment proposal.
The ruling closes the remedies phase of a case that began in 2023, when the DOJ and a coalition of states sued over Google’s dominance of the tools used to buy, sell and serve display advertising. In April 2025 Brinkema found that Google had illegally monopolised two ad tech markets, locking publishers into its exchange, where Google takes a fee reported at around 20 per cent for running instant auctions on web pages. The government wanted that exchange sold off. It will not be.
This is the second breakup Google has survived. Last year a Washington judge declined to force the sale of Chrome in the search monopoly case, ordering instead that some search data be shared with rivals. The pattern is now clear: US courts are willing to call Big Tech monopolies illegal but reluctant to dismantle them, preferring conduct rules enforced by decree.
For the ad industry, that is a mixed verdict. Publishers and independent ad tech firms who backed the suit wanted structural separation, arguing no amount of interoperability will fix a marketplace where one company runs the auction, sells to the buyers and competes with the sellers. The justice department can still appeal.
Google keeps its exchange. Rivals get promises about plumbing. And regulators everywhere, including Britain’s CMA, will be studying how a behavioural remedy actually behaves once a trillion-dollar advertising business starts implementing it.