Judge orders Google to open ad tech tools to rivals but rejects forced breakup

A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled this week that Google must rewrite core practices governing how it sells online display advertising, but she declined to force the company to sell off the ad exchange at the heart of a four-year antitrust case, handing the Justice Department a narrower victory than prosecutors had sought.

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who found in April 2025 that Google illegally monopolized two digital advertising technology markets, issued her remedies ruling on September 2 in the case brought by the Justice Department and 17 states. She rejected the government's request to force Google to divest AdX, its ad exchange, and to make the auction logic behind its publisher ad server, DFP, freely available to competitors. Instead, she ordered a set of behavioral changes: Google must share real-time bid data from its exchange with rival ad servers, retire pricing rules that publishers say suppressed competing bids, and let publishers set different price floors for individual bidders inside Google Ad Manager.

A monopoly finding without a breakup

The numbers at stake are large. Google's advertising business generated roughly $295 billion in 2025, and the "network" segment covering the open-web display ads targeted by the lawsuit accounted for about 12 percent of Alphabet's overall revenue when the case was filed. Judge Brinkema's April 2025 memorandum opinion found Google held a 91 percent share of the publisher ad-server market and had unlawfully tied that product to its ad exchange to preserve dominance in both. Her written remedies opinion has been filed under seal for 14 days while the parties negotiate redactions, so the operational detail behind the new rules is not yet public. She also ordered Google and the government to submit a jointly proposed final judgment within 30 days.

The ruling, first reported in detail by TechCrunch, is the second time in roughly a year that a federal judge has found Google guilty of illegal monopolization and then declined to order a corporate breakup. In August 2024, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had illegally maintained its dominance in general search; when he issued remedies in that case in September 2025, he likewise refused to force divestiture of Chrome or Android, opting instead to bar long exclusive default-search contracts. The ad tech case, filed in January 2023 by the Justice Department and a coalition of states under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, targeted a different part of Google's business: the plumbing that connects publishers selling ad space to advertisers bidding for it across the open web, as distinct from search advertising or Google's own properties like YouTube.

Who the ruling touches

The direct effects fall on publishers that rely on Google Ad Manager to sell display inventory, on the rival ad servers and exchanges that have long complained they cannot compete on equal terms, and on advertisers who buy through Google's Display & Video 360 platform. Under the new rules, publishers should gain more control over which bids from Google's exchange get preferential treatment, and competing ad servers should get access to bid information they previously lacked. Google keeps the entire Ad Manager stack intact, meaning small publishers who rely on its free ad-serving tier are not forced onto an unproven alternative — a factor Judge Brinkema cited in earlier proceedings as a reason to avoid a breakup that could disrupt the market during a multi-year appeals process.

Reaction split along familiar lines. Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said the company was "very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ's proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow." Groups representing publishers were less satisfied. Danielle Coffey, president and chief executive of the News/Media Alliance, said in a statement that the decision "takes some positive steps towards dismantling Google's overwhelming dominance of the adtech marketplace," but argued that "without a requirement to sell its advertising exchange, more will be needed to undo over a decade of market concentration and anticompetitive action." Ad-tech rivals were more openly skeptical that behavioral fixes will change much in practice; Jay Friedman, co-founder of the ad measurement firm CartographAI, told AdExchanger he wondered what a publisher gains from switching ad servers "if it wants to use a different ad server but still get Google's buy-side demand."

Industry groups split over the remedy

Trade associations representing large technology companies welcomed the outcome as proportionate to the violation the court actually found.

"The Court rightly rejected the proposed break-up of Google's ad-tech business, which would have gone far beyond the judge's original findings in the case. Digital advertising is fiercely competitive, and this decision confirms that antitrust remedies should be narrowly tailored to address specific identified harms," said Matt Schruers, president and chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google.

During the remedies trial, Justice Department lawyers had argued a structural breakup would be a "cleaner, less risky solution" and warned that Google could not be trusted to comply faithfully with behavioral restrictions it did not design. The government has not said whether it will appeal Judge Brinkema's refusal to order divestiture; Google, for its part, is separately appealing the underlying liability finding, though that appeal is on hold until the remedies phase concludes.

What happens next

Two clocks are now running. The confidential version of Judge Brinkema's opinion is expected to become public in mid-September once redactions are resolved, which should reveal the operational detail — timelines, compliance monitoring, reporting requirements — that will determine how much the ruling actually reshapes the market. Separately, Google and the Justice Department have 30 days to submit a jointly proposed final judgment translating the behavioral remedies into an enforceable order, a process that in the parallel search case took months of further disputes over wording. Both sides are expected to preserve their right to appeal once that judgment is entered, meaning the practical effects on publishers and advertisers may not be felt until well into 2027.