A US court has decided not to break up Google’s advertising business, despite finding that the giant has engaged in anticompetitive conduct in that space.
Instead, Google will have to follow a set of rules imposed by the court, in order to give a chance to competitors in the market.
The court “rejects Plaintiffs’ proposals for structural remedies in the form of the divestiture of AdX, the open-sourcing of DFP’s final auction logic, and the contingent divestiture of DFP Remainder. Most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies, as modified by this Court, have been accepted,” the opinion reads.
The 106-page opinion was written by Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, and explains a decision announced earlier in the month.
The document, filed on September 2 and kept under seal for two weeks for redaction review, was unsealed and made public on September 16.
We obtained a copy of it for you here.
In 2025, the same court found that Google had “willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising.”
The ruling said that Google tied its publisher ad server and its ad exchange “together through contractual policies and technological integration” – and that it “further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive policies on its customers and eliminating desirable product features.”
The conduct was found to have “substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and ultimately, consumers of information on the open web” – while violating Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.
The case was originally filed in 2023. The remedies phase included four months of discovery and an 11-day bench trial with 26 witnesses and over 100 exhibits.
In the latest ruling, Judge Brinkema said that the solution to this, sought by the government – divestiture of AdX – is “neither feasible nor an appropriate remedy.”
The judge said that the time it would take to migrate AdX to a new owner would be up to 540 days from the signing of the deal, and another two years to migrate customers, on top of the time needed to find and approve a buyer.
The functionality of AdX after the sale could not be guaranteed, the court said, and this is technology that “absolutely has to work for customers.”
And the judge invoked equity, saying that the court must “consider the harms that might befall other market actors, even if that means ... forgoing a remedy that could help restore competition.”
And, “antitrust remedies must cause as little injury as possible to the interest of the general public,” the opinion said, citing a 1911 Supreme Court ruling, American Tobacco.
As for the proposal to open-source the auction logic of DFP, the court found it “neither appropriate nor reasonable.”
And the judge also rejected the government’s push for this as based on a “lack of trust that Google will comply with an order from this court and an unrealistic desire for certainty.”
Google will instead have to connect AdX to rival publisher ad servers and to Prebid, and connect DFP to Prebid. The giant will also have to share data with third parties, and will be banned from discriminatory bidding.
A Monitor and a Technical Committee will also be appointed, as both sides had asked for.
The judge said that these measures will be enough to “effectively pry open to competition the ad tech markets that were injured by Google’s unlawful conduct and prevent Google from reverting to anticompetitive conduct in these markets.”
The injunction will last six years, as requested by Google, and not 15, as the government wanted. The court said that a longer period “runs the risk of ‘impairing rather than enhancing competition’” – and that markets “are often more effective than the heavy hand of judicial power when it comes to enhancing consumer welfare.”
In a rapidly changing industry, imposing a remedy “is not unlike trying to shoe a galloping horse,” the opinion said.
As the Open Markets Institute executive director Barry Lynn put it, the ruling is “more proof the U.S. judiciary is abdicating its congressionally mandated duty to apply the text and spirit of the nation’s antitrust laws.” The Open Markets Institute has received funding from the Open Society Foundations and the Omidyar Network Fund.
The judgment will take effect 60 days after entry, except for the work on appointing the Monitor, which starts immediately. The parties have 30 days to file one jointly proposed final judgment.
The ruling also covers Google’s use of first-party data, and here the judge found that the giant can continue to use it “without sharing it with third parties” in order to comply with publisher preferences, its internal privacy policy and privacy law.
The carve-outs, the court said, “should balance the importance of consumer privacy and the significant resources that Google has invested in upholding and maintaining privacy protections.”
The court noted that Google’s advertising tool does not currently use first-party data to bid on open-web display ads at all, so “this concern is premature. For now, this non-discrimination remedy merely puts in writing the status quo.”