By Jody Godoy
Sept 2 (Reuters) - Alphabet's Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers' bid to force a sale of Google's online advertising exchange.
While the ad exchange is a small part of Google's business, the ruling is the second powerful symbolic victory against the U.S. Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies.
U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria,
Virginia, declined to make Google sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies.
The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites.
In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found.
The tech giant's anticompetitive conduct "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," Brinkema said at the time.
At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior.
Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. The company also sought to show the DOJ's demand was different from Google's own previous offer to sell AdX to end an EU antitrust investigation, which Reuters reported in 2024.
Ad Manager represented 4.1% of Google's overall revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020, according to Wedbush research and analysis of court documents. More recent figures were redacted from court documents.
U.S. TECH CRACKDOWN IN JEOPARDY
The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump's first term. It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry's unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.
A federal judge in Washington last year rejected the Federal Trade Commission's attempt to make Meta Platforms sell off Instagram and WhatsApp, saying the agency failed to prove that Meta holds a monopoly in a social media landscape that has shifted drastically since the case was brought in 2020.
Likewise, another judge in Washington, who previously ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly in online search, rejected the DOJ's bid to make the company sell its Chrome browser, citing rising competition from generative artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.
U.S. antitrust cases against Amazon and Apple, which involve massive smartphone and online retail markets, will not go to trial until 2027 at the earliest.
(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
