WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled this week that Google will not have to sell its advertising technology business, despite finding the company illegally monopolized digital advertising markets. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema’s decision leaves the three-sided ad-tech stack Google has built over two decades intact, subject to new behavioral rules whose specific terms the court has not yet made public.
Judge Brinkema, sitting in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, rejected the Justice Department’s central remedy request: that Google be forced to divest AdX, its advertising exchange, and possibly Google Ad Manager, the publisher ad server bundled with it. Instead, she ordered behavioral remedies, restrictions on how Google must conduct its business, rather than changing who owns what.
The full text of those restrictions is temporarily sealed, giving Google time to redact commercially sensitive information before the ruling becomes public. What is known from Engadget’s reporting on the order is that the remedies end first look, last look, and unified pricing rules: the specific mechanics by which Google’s exchange historically saw and responded to bids in ways that outside exchanges could not. Brinkema also ordered Google to create a server-to-server integration between its publisher ad server and Prebid, an open-source header-bidding wrapper that independent publishers use to access demand sources outside Google’s ecosystem.
The DOJ called the ruling a prevailing. The Justice Department said in its announcement that Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater described Google as a monopolist that had abused its power, framing the behavioral remedies as a meaningful constraint on the company’s conduct. What the DOJ did not get is the remedy it argued would actually restore competition.
The department filed suit in January 2023, contending that Google had achieved control of all three layers of the digital advertising market simultaneously: the technology publishers use to offer inventory, the technology advertisers use to buy it, and the auction exchange that sits between them. That triple ownership, the DOJ argued, let Google manipulate every step of the transaction in ways no outside buyer or seller could see or counter. Gizmodo reported that the remedy Brinkema rejected would have forced Google to sell AdX to a buyer who would operate it independently.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, said the company would continue making its tools effective for publishers and advertisers. Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, argued the ruling failed to match remedy to harm: behavioral rules would require years of monitoring and repeated litigation to enforce, while Google’s structural advantage compounds. Matt Schruers, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said Brinkema rightly rejected a breakup that would have gone far beyond the court’s original findings.
The case follows a pattern now twice established in Google’s major antitrust exposure. The original liability ruling established that Google’s ad-tech stack constituted an illegal monopoly — the foundation on which Brinkema’s remedy decision now rests. In 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that Google held an illegal monopoly over general search and ultimately declined to require the company to sell Chrome. Brinkema has now applied similar reasoning to the ad-tech stack: the monopoly is real, but structural separation was not the remedy she chose.
The thirty-day deadline for a jointly proposed final judgment begins with the order, meaning the specific terms Google must follow are not yet written. Google and the DOJ will negotiate language together and, where they disagree, Brinkema will decide. Google’s September Android update, which brought Gemini-powered accessibility tools to hundreds of millions of devices, illustrates how the company’s product surface has expanded well beyond advertising since the original suit was filed.
For independent publishers, the practical test is whether ending unified pricing and connecting the publisher ad server to Prebid will alter the economics of the open web in any measurable way. The theoretical case for behavioral remedies is that targeted rules, once enforced, can restore competition without the transaction costs of divestiture. The practical counterargument, one antitrust economists have made in both ad-tech and search contexts, is that behavioral remedies imposed on a company that controls infrastructure give that company both the motivation and the means to find workarounds, and that courts are not well positioned to monitor the engineering choices behind a real-time advertising auction at the granularity enforcement requires.
The sealed opinion will answer, once public, whether Brinkema addressed that gap directly. Until then, Google keeps AdX, keeps the fee it charges publishers on the exchange, and keeps the integrated stack the DOJ spent three years arguing was the core of the illegal tie. Nvidia’s $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, announced the same week, raised questions about concentration at the AI infrastructure layer. The Google ruling raises a different version of the same question: whether the antitrust system, as currently applied, can restore competition in markets where platform incumbents have already consolidated every layer of the stack.
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