A US judge on 2 September 2026 rejected the Department of Justice’s bid to break up Google’s online advertising exchange, declining to order the company to sell AdX and leaving the architecture of its ad-tech operation largely unchanged. The ruling, handed down by Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, closes the most consequential chapter of a years-long antitrust campaign against the search giant’s grip on digital advertising infrastructure — without dismantling the machinery at its centre.
What the Court Decided and What It Left Standing
Brinkema accepted most of the behavioral remedies proposed by the parties rather than ordering a divestiture of AdX, according to The Guardian. The exchange, which sits between publishers selling ad space and the buyers competing to fill it, charges publishers a 20% fee on every transaction conducted through its instant auctions, which run automatically each time a user loads a webpage.
The decision to preserve Google’s ownership of AdX follows an earlier liability ruling from the same judge. In April 2025, Brinkema found that Google holds illegal monopolies on both the ad servers that host publisher inventory and on the ad exchanges that intermediate between buyers and sellers. That ruling stated that Google’s anticompetitive conduct had “substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.”
A central finding in that April ruling was that Google unlawfully locked publishers using its ad server into also using AdX, foreclosing meaningful competition in the exchange market. Despite those conclusions, Brinkema stopped well short of the structural remedy the DOJ had sought. The DOJ and a coalition of states brought the original suit against Google in 2023, targeting its dominance across advertising technology markets used by publishers and websites across the open web. As of 2020, Google’s Ad Manager represented 4.1% of the company’s overall revenue and 1.5% of operating profit, according to Wedbush research and analysis of court documents; more recent figures were redacted.
Crypto-Gaming Operators Among the Most Exposed Advertisers
The Cryptoplinko editorial team, which tracks both digital advertising markets and the crypto-gaming sector, notes that the ruling leaves the sharpest exposure among operators whose entire user-acquisition model runs through the ad-tech infrastructure the court has declined to restructure. With the publisher lock-in finding now on record and the 20% exchange fee still in place, the intermediary layer that connects advertisers to audiences remains under the same ownership and subject to the same pricing decisions as before.
Platforms that let users play plinko with crypto have to route their entire player-acquisition effort through the same ad-tech intermediaries the ruling leaves in Google’s hands, folding Google’s pricing and policy decisions into every marketing choice they make. For operators in that category, the inability to sidestep AdX without abandoning the reach it provides is not an abstract concern — it is the concrete consequence of the lock-in the court found illegal but chose not to unwind through divestiture.
“Marketing-dependent digital-entertainment platforms had the most to gain from a forced structural remedy. Instead, they face the same intermediary, the same 20% toll, and the same lock-in dynamics the court already found to be unlawful.”
Three Consecutive Breakup Rejections Signal Judicial Caution
Wednesday’s decision is the third time in succession that a US judge has declined to order a major tech company to sell a core asset. The pattern holds across different courts, different agencies, and different market definitions.
A federal judge in Washington rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s bid to make Meta sell Instagram and WhatsApp, ruling that the agency had failed to prove Meta holds a social media monopoly in a market that had shifted significantly since the case was brought in 2020. In a separate matter, a Washington judge who had previously found Google holds an illegal monopoly in online search also refused to order the sale of its Chrome browser, citing rising competitive pressure from generative AI companies including OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Taken together, the three decisions suggest US courts remain reluctant to impose structural breakups as antitrust remedies even when they have already found monopolistic behaviour on the liability question. Behavioral remedies, which impose conditions on how a dominant company operates rather than forcing it to divest, appear to be the ceiling of what judges are willing to award at this stage of the technology antitrust cycle.
The Arguments That Failed and the Cases Still Ahead
At trial, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to operate AdX fairly given its documented past behaviour in the market. Google countered that a forced sale would be technically complex and would produce a prolonged, disruptive transition that would ultimately harm the customers it claimed to want to protect. Brinkema’s acceptance of behavioral rather than structural remedies suggests the court found that argument persuasive, or at minimum insufficient to clear the bar for divestiture.
The broader antitrust crackdown on large technology companies, however, remains unfinished. Cases brought against Amazon and Apple, covering smartphone and online retail markets respectively, are not expected to reach trial until 2027 at the earliest. Whether those proceedings produce a different judicial posture toward structural remedies, or reinforce the pattern now established across three consecutive rulings, remains an open question for the years ahead.
David Prior
David Prior is the editor of Today News, responsible for the overall editorial strategy. He is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with over 20 years’ experience, and is also editor of the award-winning hyperlocal news title Altrincham Today. His LinkedIn profile is here.
