Catenaa, Wednesday, September 02, 2026- Google doesn’t have to sell off its advertising exchange and instead must make its ad tech tools work with those operated by rivals, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued her decision under seal, accompanied by a short order rejecting the Justice Department’s bid to force a sale of Google’s AdX.
Instead, she ordered proposed behavioral changes to Google’s business without describing what those are. The redacted decision will be issued later.
Brinkema’s decision allows Google to avoid a forced sale after an April 2025 ruling that the company illegally monopolized two advertising technology markets.
The Justice Department had asked Brinkema to force Google to sell its exchange and make public the auction logic that decides which advertisement will show on a website.
“Most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies, as modified by this court, be and are accepted,” Brinkema wrote in her order. The full decision with redactions will be released later this month.
Google shares were up by 0.8% at $334.76 at 12.15 p.m. in New York.
Companies will spend more than $919.6 billion globally on digital advertising, according to estimates by research firm EMarketer, making the industry one of the largest segments of the broader tech economy.
Google’s ad tech stack sits between publishers selling display space and advertisers bidding on it, giving the company a powerful position in how prices are set and which ads appear.
Regulators have long argued that controlling both the dominant publisher ad server and one of the largest ad exchanges allowed Google to advantage its own systems at multiple points in the process.
The Justice Department could still appeal the ruling, and Google continues to face scrutiny from state attorneys general, private plaintiffs and European regulators over its advertising practices.
The pace and scope of Google’s implementation will likely determine whether the remedy produces meaningful competitive shifts in the display ad market.
The decision is a win for Google, which avoided a breakup in the Justice Department’s first antitrust case over its monopoly in the online search market.
There, a Washington federal judge ruled that Google doesn’t have to sell off its popular Chrome web browser and instead must make available to rivals some of the data underlying its search results.
