Google will not have to sell its advertising technology business after US District Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Department of Justice’s attempt to force a sale.
Quick Backstory: The DOJ and a coalition of states sued Google in 2023, arguing it used its grip on both sides of the ad market to squeeze out competitors. On one side, Google runs the software publishers use to sell ad space on their sites. On the other, it runs the tools advertisers use to buy that space. And in the middle, it runs the exchange where the two meet.
In April 2025, Judge Brinkema found the company had illegally monopolized two of those markets and unlawfully tied its ad server to AdX, the exchange where publishers pay Google a 20% cut to sell ads in auctions that run the instant a page loads. The DOJ wanted Google to sell off AdX, but Google argued it should just have to change how it behaves instead. Ultimately Brinkema sided with Google, questioning who would actually buy AdX, whether small publishers would lose the free ad server they rely on, and how many years of appeals a forced sale would drag through before anything changed.
So what does Google have to do now?
We’ll find out shortly. Judge Brinkema’s opinion is currently sealed, and the DOJ and Google have 30 days to file a joint proposed final judgment spelling out how it all gets implemented.
Previously Google proposed a number of competitive fixes including:
- Making real-time bid amounts for open web display ads sold through AdX available to rival ad servers, so that they can see the same bid data Google’s own server sees, and publishers can tell whether AdX actually won on price or just on access.
- Deprecating its Unified Pricing Rules and allowing publishers to set different price floors for individual bidders. This would allow publishers to charge Google more than they charge everyone else, or set a higher bar for AdX specifically, instead of being forced to apply one floor to every bidder.
- Not using “first look” and “last look” privileges to adjust its bid for open-web display ads, which it says it stopped doing years ago anyway.
- No longer offering different revenue shares based on which ad server a publisher uses, to stop publishers from being financially nudged toward Google Ad Manager over a competitor’s ad server.
Brinkema has accepted most of the behavioral remedies both sides have proposed, so the final remedies will likely look something like the above.
