A federal judge in Virginia declined to force Google to sell its advertising exchange platform, handing the Justice Department its third consecutive failure to break up a major tech company through antitrust litigation.
Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled Wednesday in Alexandria, Va., that Google must change certain business practices but rejected the DOJ's demand that the company divest AdX, the ad exchange at the center of a years-long antitrust fight. The decision came more than a year after Brinkema herself found that Google had illegally monopolized key segments of the online advertising market, a finding that, in the end, produced behavioral fixes rather than the structural overhaul federal enforcers wanted.
The ruling marks the third time U.S. antitrust enforcers have pushed to break apart a Big Tech giant and walked away empty-handed. A separate federal judge in Washington previously rejected the DOJ's bid to force Google to sell its Chrome browser, citing rising competition from generative AI companies like OpenAI's ChatGPT. And another Washington judge turned back the Federal Trade Commission's attempt to make Meta Platforms sell Instagram and WhatsApp, a case the FTC has appealed.
The gap between the liability ruling and the remedy is striking. In April 2025, Brinkema concluded that Google holds illegal monopolies over both the servers that host publisher ads and the ad exchanges that sit between buyers and sellers. She wrote at the time that Google's conduct had "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web."
The DOJ and a broad coalition of states, which sued Google in 2023, argued the company could not be trusted to run AdX given its track record. Federal prosecutors pushed for a forced sale as the only meaningful remedy.
Google countered that a forced divestiture would be technically difficult, cause a long and painful transition, and ultimately hurt the very customers the government claimed to protect. The company proposed its own fixes, including providing real-time bid access to competitors. Brinkema sided with Google's framing, accepting behavioral remedies over structural ones.
She said a detailed written ruling would follow within 14 days, with time built in to redact confidential business information.
Google executive Lee-Anne Mulholland welcomed the outcome:
"We're very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ's proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow."
The DOJ, for its part, posted on X that it was "pleased that the court ordered substantial relief" and declared it is "one step closer to restoring competition and bringing relief for the American people in online advertising markets." The department added that it is "evaluating appropriate next steps", language that leaves the door open to an appeal.
For all the courtroom drama, the business unit at stake is not one of Google's crown jewels. Ad Manager, the broader platform that includes AdX, represented just 4.1% of Google's overall revenue and 1.5% of its operating profit in 2020, according to Wedbush research and analysis of court documents. More recent figures were redacted from the record.
Google charges publishers a 20% fee to sell ads through AdX in auctions that happen in fractions of a second, every time a user loads a webpage. The system is deeply embedded in how online advertising works, which is precisely why the DOJ argued a clean break was necessary, and why Google argued it would be disruptive.
The April 2025 liability ruling found Google had violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the federal law that bars monopolistic behavior, in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets. But the court dismissed claims that Google monopolized the advertiser ad network market, a partial win that Google believes strengthens its grounds for appeal and weakens the case for divestiture.
Google shares edged up 0.6% after the ruling, a muted reaction that suggests Wall Street had already priced in the likelihood that the company would keep its ad tech stack intact.
The pattern is hard to ignore. Federal antitrust enforcers have now sought forced divestitures against Google (twice) and Meta, and judges have rejected the remedy each time. The Chrome case fell apart after a judge concluded that competition from AI startups was already reshaping the market. The Meta case, in which the FTC sought to unwind the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, was turned back and is now on appeal.
Cases against Amazon and Apple, targeting their positions in online retail and smartphone markets, have not yet gone to trial. Whether those suits fare any better remains an open question, but the track record so far offers little reason for optimism.
Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project, an advocacy group that has pushed for legislative action, said the results should:
"prove that the courts alone will not save us from Big Tech."
That assessment, at least, is hard to argue with on the merits. Courts have consistently found anticompetitive conduct but balked at the one remedy, forced breakups, that would impose real structural consequences. The result is a growing stack of guilty verdicts paired with remedies that amount to behavioral tweaks.
Google's competitive position has also drawn scrutiny overseas. The European Union has pursued its own antitrust actions against the company, and Reuters reported in 2024 that Google offered to sell AdX to resolve an EU investigation, a concession it successfully avoided making at home.
What Brinkema's behavioral remedies will look like in practice remains unclear until the detailed ruling drops. Google's own proposal centered on giving competitors real-time access to bidding data, a transparency measure, not a structural change. The company keeps AdX, keeps the publisher ad server, and keeps the integrated system that the court itself found had illegally locked publishers into Google's ecosystem.
The DOJ's statement that it is evaluating next steps leaves open the possibility of an appeal, but the department's language was notably measured. Calling itself "pleased" with the relief ordered is a far cry from the aggressive posture it struck when seeking divestiture.
Meanwhile, the broader tech landscape continues to shift. Generative AI companies are reshaping how users interact with the internet, and at least one federal judge has already cited that competition as a reason to leave Google's business intact. Political calls to break up Big Tech companies continue from both sides of the aisle, but the courtroom results tell a different story.
Three swings, three misses. If the federal government wants to restructure Big Tech, it will need a better strategy than the one it keeps running, because the courts have made clear they are not going to do the heavy lifting.