Judge Rejects DOJ Bid to Force Google Ad Tech Sale

In a significant victory for Alphabet’s Google, a federal judge in Virginia rejected the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) request to force the company to sell its online advertising exchange business, known as AdX (The Guardian, UPI, Ars Technica). The ruling follows an April 2025 decision by Judge Leonie Brinkema, who found that Google held illegal monopolies in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets but concluded that behavioral remedies were sufficient instead of a breakup.

The DOJ had argued during the remedy phase that forcing Google to sell its ad exchange would level the playing field. However, Judge Brinkema accepted most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies without requiring Google to open-source or sell parts of its AdX business (UPI). The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by US antitrust enforcers to break up big tech companies, following similar decisions involving Meta Platforms and Google’s Chrome browser (The Guardian).

The DOJ sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using AdX, harming competition and consumers (UPI). Despite this, the judge found that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long transition period that could hurt customers (The Guardian).

Google’s Ad Manager represented 4.1% of the company's overall revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020, according to Wedbush research and analysis of court documents (The Guardian). The ruling is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking big tech’s unprecedented power over the US economy (The Guardian).