Google escapes bid to force sale of ad tech business in DOJ defeat | Latest Tech News
Alphabet’s Google escaped a breakup of its promoting technology business on Wednesday, when a choose in Virginia rejected US antitrust enforcers’ bid to force a sale of Google’s online promoting exchange.
While the ad exchange is a small half of Google’s business, the ruling is the second highly effective symbolic victory against the Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to promote property to handle unlawful monopolies.
Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Va., declined to make Google promote AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% payment to promote advertisements in auctions that occur immediately when customers load web sites. She accepted most of the events’ proposed behavioral remedies.
While the ad exchange is a small half of Google’s business, the ruling is the second highly effective symbolic victory against the Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to promote property to handle unlawful monopolies. Confidence – stock.adobe.com
The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for promoting technology used by online publishers and web sites.
In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds unlawful monopolies on servers that host writer advertisements and ad exchanges which sit between consumers and sellers.
Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into utilizing its AdX, the choose discovered.
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 yr on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google can’t be trusted to run AdX, given its past habits.
Google argued that a pressured sale can be technically tough and end result in a long and painful transition that would harm clients.
At a trial last yr on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google can’t be trusted to run AdX, given its past habits. CEO Sundar Pichai, above. Getty Images
The company also sought to show the DOJ’s demand was different from Google’s own earlier offer to promote AdX to end an EU antitrust investigation, which GWN reported in 2024.
Ad Manager represented 4.1% of Google’s total income and 1.5% of working revenue in 2020, according to Wedbush research and analysis of court paperwork.
More current figures had been redacted from court paperwork.
US tech crackdown in jeopardy
The ruling is the third time in a row that a choose has rejected a bid by US antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that began during President Trump’s first time period.
It is probably going to fuel questions about whether or not courts are up to the duty of checking the industry’s unprecedented energy over the US financial system.
Google argued that a pressured sale can be technically tough and end result in a long and painful transition that would harm clients. Christopher Sadowski
A federal choose in Washington last yr rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to make Meta Platforms dump Instagram and WhatsApp, saying the company failed to show that Meta holds a monopoly in a social media panorama that has shifted drastically since the case was introduced in 2020.
Likewise, another choose in Washington, who beforehand ruled that Google holds an unlawful monopoly in online search, rejected the DOJ’s bid to make the company promote its Chrome browser, citing rising competitors from generative artificial intelligence corporations such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
US antitrust circumstances against Amazon and Apple, which contain huge smartphone and online retail markets, is not going to go to trial until 2027 at the earliest.
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