Google escapes DOJ bid to break up its ad tech business

Google escaped a forced sale of its online advertising exchange on Wednesday, after U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, rejected the Department of Justice's bid to make the company divest AdX.

Judge Brinkema declined to order Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, to sell AdX, the exchange where publishers pay a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that run in real time as users load websites. She accepted most of the behavioral remedies proposed by the parties instead.

The ruling marks the second time a judge has rejected a DOJ effort to force Google to sell assets. A federal judge in Washington had previously found Google guilty of holding an illegal monopoly in online search but stopped short of ordering the company to divest its Chrome browser, pointing to intensifying competition from generative AI firms such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The lawsuit, brought jointly by the DOJ and a coalition of states in 2023, centered on Google's grip over ad technology infrastructure relied upon by web publishers. Judge Brinkema sided largely with the government in April 2025, determining that Google had illegally monopolized both the publisher ad server and ad exchange segments of the market and had improperly tied use of its ad server to adoption of AdX.

During the remedies phase of the trial, the DOJ contended that Google's history of misconduct made it unfit to continue operating AdX. Google pushed back, arguing that unwinding the exchange would be an intricate technical undertaking causing prolonged disruption for customers. The company further maintained that its previously reported 2024 offer to divest AdX as part of a separate E.U. antitrust proceeding bore no resemblance to what the DOJ was seeking here.

Ad Manager, the business that includes AdX, accounted for 4.1% of Google's total revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020, per CNBC, which drew on Wedbush research and court document analysis. More recent figures were redacted from court documents.

Wednesday's outcome is the third consecutive time a judge has rejected an antitrust breakup effort targeting a major technology company. In a separate Washington courtroom, a federal judge threw out the Federal Trade Commission's case seeking to strip Meta Platforms of Instagram and WhatsApp, concluding that the FTC had fallen short of establishing monopoly power in a social media environment that looked very different from the one that existed when the lawsuit was initiated in 2020.

Separate government antitrust actions targeting Amazon and Apple — focused on their respective dominance in online retail and smartphone ecosystems — face courtroom dates no sooner than 2027, CNBC reported.