Google Escapes Forced Breakup of AdX Marketplace

Google avoided a forced breakup of its advertising technology business, Reuters reported Wednesday (Sept. 2).

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, rejected the Department of Justice’s bid to require Google to sell AdX, the company’s advertising exchange where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads through auctions that occur when users load websites. She accepted most of the behavioral remedies proposed by the parties, according to the report.

The DOJ and a coalition of states sued Google in 2023, alleging that the company dominated markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites, the report said.

Brinkema ruled in April 2025 that Google held illegal monopolies over publisher ad servers and ad exchanges and had unlawfully tied publishers using its ad server to its AdX exchange. At the time, Brinkema said Google’s conduct had “substantially harmed” publisher customers, the competitive process and consumers of information on the open web.

During last year’s remedies trial, the DOJ argued that Google could not be trusted to operate AdX because of its past conduct, according to the report. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and lead to a lengthy transition that could hurt customers. The company also argued that the DOJ’s proposal differed from an earlier offer by Google to sell AdX as part of an effort to resolve a European Union antitrust investigation.

Ad Manager accounted for 4.1% of Google’s overall revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020, per the report, which cited Wedbush research and an analysis of court documents. More recent figures were redacted from the court documents.

The decision is the third consecutive instance in which a judge in the United States has rejected an antitrust enforcement effort to break up a major technology company. A federal judge last year rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to force Meta Platforms to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, while another Washington judge rejected the DOJ’s proposal to require Google to sell its Chrome browser, citing increased competition from generative artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.