Google keeps its ad exchange after US antitrust remedies ruling
A September 2 remedies order from Judge Leonie Brinkema lets Google keep its AdX ad exchange after it lost the ad-tech antitrust case on liability in 2025. The order rejects three structural remedies (an AdX divestiture, open-sourcing DFP's final auction logic, and a contingent DFP Remainder divestiture) and accepts most behavioral remedies, whose specifics stay in a Memorandum Opinion sealed for 14 days. A jointly proposed Final Judgment is due within 30 days.
A federal judge is letting Google keep the ad exchange the Justice Department wanted sold. On September 2, Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia signed a two-page order in United States v. Google LLC that turned down the government's push to break up Google's ad-tech stack. She accepted most of the proposed behavioral fixes, as modified by the court.
Google already lost on liability in 2025, when the court found it had illegally monopolized the markets for publisher ad servers and ad exchanges that serve open-web display ads. The September 2 order decides the penalty. On that penalty Google avoided the structural remedy the Justice Department wanted most, which is why 9to5Google and Ars Technica read it as a win for Google.
The headlines stopped at AdX, but the order refused three structural remedies, not one. The court declined to force a divestiture of AdX, declined to make Google open-source the final auction logic inside its DFP publisher ad server, and declined a contingent divestiture of the DFP Remainder.
What Google did not dodge is conduct rules. The court accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies, as modified, but the specifics sit in a Memorandum Opinion that is under seal. Google and the DOJ have 14 days to ask for redactions. If neither moves, the opinion unseals. If the court grants redactions, a public redacted version follows.
There is a second clock. Within 30 days the parties must meet and confer and file a single jointly proposed Final Judgment that reflects the sealed opinion. That joint filing, not the order alone, is where the enforceable language will land, and the clerk was directed to forward the order and the sealed opinion to counsel of record.
The shape is familiar. In the separate search case, the court found Google an illegal monopolist and still let it keep Chrome and its data, ordering behavioral limits instead. The ad-tech remedy lands in the same place, while Google's own manual-action fight in the EEA keeps another front open.
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