A Judge Told Google to Rewrite Its Ad Auctions. She Refused to Break the Company Up.
Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Justice Department's demand that Google sell its AdX exchange, opting instead for rules on how the auctions run. It is the second time in a year a court has found Google an illegal monopolist and then declined to dismantle it.
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Google to retool the machinery behind its monopoly in digital advertising while sparing the company the breakup the U.S. government had spent three years pursuing. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, sitting in Alexandria, Virginia, issued a two-page order rejecting the Justice Department's central demand — that Google be forced to sell AdX, the exchange at the center of the case — and said she was adopting most of the remedies proposed by the two sides. Her full opinion, which contains the specific terms, will stay under seal for 14 days so the parties can propose redactions. The two sides have 30 days to submit a jointly proposed final judgment.
What Brinkema did order are behavioral fixes rather than surgery. Google must make its ad tools interoperable with rival systems and stop three auction practices the court found depressed what publishers earn, including the arrangement that gave AdX first crack at every impression a publisher put up for sale. What she declined to order is the list the government wanted most: divestiture of AdX, open-sourcing the final auction logic inside Google's DoubleClick for Publishers ad server, and a contingent sale of the DFP Remainder business.
For Google, the relief is enormous and it is the second such reprieve in a year. After a different judge, Amit Mehta, declared Google's search engine an illegal monopoly in 2024, the Justice Department pushed to force a sale of the Chrome browser and was turned down last September. The ad tech case dates to a 2023 Justice Department lawsuit that produced an illegal-monopoly judgment last year. The technology at issue is not marginal: by Google's own court filings, the exchange handles 55 million ad requests per second, feeding a business that generates a substantial share of Alphabet's roughly $400 billion in annual advertising sales. Alphabet is now worth $4.11 trillion.
"We're very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ's proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow," said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president for regulatory affairs. In the run-up to the ruling the company had argued that unwinding the network would be reckless because publishers depend on it to finance services millions of people use. "This is technology that absolutely has to keep working for consumers," Google said.
Justice Department lawyers had warned Brinkema at closing arguments in November that leaving the stack intact would let Google "manipulate computer algorithms that are the engine of its monopolies in ways too difficult to detect." Critics of the industry were blunter about the outcome. "It takes an Olympic level of mental gymnastics to find that Google is operating an illegal monopoly and then decide to do nothing about it," said Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project, who argued Brinkema, like Mehta before her, was "sending the wrong message at the wrong time." Investors have already shown what they think of that kind of penalty: since Mehta's search ruling, Alphabet's stock has climbed 45 percent, adding about $1.3 trillion in shareholder wealth.
Originally reported by Associated Press.