Published: October 3, 2026 · Last updated: October 3, 2026
TL;DR: Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Justice Department’s request to force Google to sell its ad exchange, AdX, ordering behavioral fixes, data-sharing rules, and a six-year outside monitor instead of a breakup.
Google just avoided a breakup for the second time in less than a year, and the second time came with a longer list of conditions attached.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, sitting in Alexandria, Virginia, rejected the Justice Department’s request to force Google to sell off its ad exchange, AdX, along with other pieces of its advertising technology stack. The ruling follows her earlier decision finding that Google illegally monopolized the auction technology that decides which ads show up on websites across the internet. Winning that earlier finding did not get the DOJ the remedy it wanted. Brinkema called a forced divestiture “neither realistic nor needed,” and described the government’s push for a breakup as reflecting “a lack of trust that Google will comply with an order from this court and an unrealistic desire for certainty.”
Instead of a sale, Google is getting behavioral remedies: new data-sharing requirements with publishers, an injunction barring the company from favoring its own products when bidding in ad auctions, and a mandate to integrate its ad exchange with rival publisher ad servers instead of locking them into a Google-only pipeline. A third-party monitor and a technical committee will oversee whether Google actually follows through. The Justice Department wanted that oversight to last more than 12 years. Google asked for six. Brinkema sided with Google’s six-year number, though the court can extend it if Google hasn’t fully complied by the time it expires.
“She very much understood the assignment on remedies. Not merely stop the specific conduct as Google argued, but terminate the illegal monopoly, deny Google the fruits of its violations, restore competition, and prevent future monopolization,” said Jason Kint, an industry commentator who has tracked the case closely.
Kint also pointed out that Brinkema reaffirmed her earlier view that Google’s demand-side tool, AdWords, acts as the “golden goose” propping up the company’s dominance, even though Google argued that tool sat outside the markets she’d found illegal. The nondiscrimination and routing restrictions in the final order apply to AdWords specifically because of that finding.
Google’s reaction was muted in public. Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s VP of regulatory affairs, posted on social media that Google was “very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow.” The company later took the post down, without explaining why.
The ad exchange itself is a relatively small slice of Google’s overall business. AdX runs auctions where publishers currently pay a 20% fee for the privilege of selling ad space in real time as a page loads. Small as it is in revenue terms, the symbolism is not small. This is the second time in two separate monopoly findings against Google that a court has declined to order a structural breakup, choosing instead to police behavior going forward. Whether that approach actually opens the ad tech market to new competitors, or just gives Google a compliance checklist to work around, is the question that will take years to answer, not months.
There’s a second antitrust front running in parallel that this ruling doesn’t touch. Google is separately appealing a European Digital Markets Act requirement that it share search history data with competitors, and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has pushed Google to make it easier for Android and Chrome users to switch default search engines. None of that is resolved by Brinkema’s order. It just means Google is fighting roughly the same fight, over data and defaults, on three different continents at once.
Related: Google Is Paying Some Publishers for AI Overviews, and Most Are Getting Pennies and A Federal Judge Just Told Publishers Their Google Traffic Was Never Promised to Anyone.
Bottom Line: A monopoly finding without a breakup is still a monopoly finding. Google gets to keep its ad exchange, but it now has to run it under a six-year microscope, and the publishers who’ve spent years complaining about Google’s cut of the auction finally have a court order they can point to when the behavior doesn’t change.
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