Google defeats U.S. bid to force ad tech asset sale

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Google defeats ad tech sale bid

Highlights

U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema rules Alphabet's Google will not be forced to sell AdX, rejecting DOJ's ad tech asset divestiture request.
Brinkema finds Google holds illegal monopolies in publisher ad servers and ad exchanges, unlawfully tying its ad server to AdX and harming competition.
Ad Manager contributed 4.1% of Google’s overall revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020, with recent figures in court filings redacted.

Virginia ruling on ad exchange remedies

As reported by Reuters, U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, rejects a request from U.S. antitrust enforcers to make Alphabet's Google sell AdX, the online advertising exchange where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that run when users load websites.

The decision follows the 2023 lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice and a broad coalition of states over Google's dominance in advertising technology markets used by online publishers and websites. Brinkema instead accepts most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies rather than ordering a breakup of this part of Google's ad tech business.

In April 2025, Brinkema rules that Google holds illegal monopolies in publisher ad servers and ad exchanges that sit between buyers and sellers. She finds that Google unlawfully locks publishers using its ad server into AdX, and says the company's anticompetitive conduct substantially harms publisher customers, the competitive process and consumers of information on the open web.

Impact on Google and antitrust enforcement

Although AdX is a relatively small part of Google's broader operations, the ruling marks a second significant symbolic defeat for the U.S. Department of Justice in its push to make Google sell assets to remedy illegal monopolies.

At a remedies trial last year, the DOJ argues that Google cannot be trusted to operate AdX given its past conduct. Google counters that a forced sale would be technically difficult and lead to a long, painful transition that would hurt customers.

Google also seeks to distinguish the DOJ's position from its own earlier offer to sell AdX to resolve a European Union antitrust investigation, a proposal Reuters reports in 2024. According to Wedbush research and analysis of court documents, Ad Manager accounts for 4.1% of Google's overall revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020, while more recent figures are redacted.

Our earlier coverage of the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon’s ad auction practices explained allegations that a “soft reserve” mechanism in some second-price auctions may have raised what advertisers ultimately paid. The piece also outlined how marketers were reassessing budget exposure, pushing for more independent measurement, and weighing the likely market impact amid ongoing transparency concerns across major ad platforms.

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