Google Keeps AdX as Court Orders Behavioral Remedies in Ad-Tech Antitrust Case

Sept. 17, 2026 — A federal judge has rejected the Department of Justice’s request to force Google to sell its AdX advertising exchange, instead ordering a package of behavioral remedies intended to open parts of Google’s ad-tech business to greater competition.

Kept under seal until today, the September 2 remedies opinion in United States, et al. v. Google LLC, No. 1:23-cv-00108 (E.D. Va.), declined to require Google to divest AdX or to open-source Google Ad Manager’s final auction logic, meaning the rules or code governing how Google’s publisher ad server selects the winning bid. Judge Leonie Brinkema concluded that modified behavioral remedies would be sufficient to address the anticompetitive conduct the court previously found in Google’s advertising technology business.

The opinion leaves Google in control of AdX while requiring remedies focused on interoperability, data sharing, anti-discrimination, monitoring, and compliance. The ruling gives Google a significant victory on the central question of ownership, but it does not leave the company untouched. Instead, it places Google under a court-supervised regime designed to prevent the company from using its ad-tech stack to disadvantage rivals.

What the Court Rejected

The Department of Justice and a coalition of states had urged the court to require divestiture, arguing that behavioral commitments alone would not adequately address the competitive harm identified in the case. Government attorneys maintained that Google could not be trusted to operate the exchange fairly after years of conduct the court found unlawful.

Google argued that divestiture would be technically complex, disruptive to customers, and unnecessary to restore competition. Judge Brinkema agreed, writing that “structural remedies are neither realistic nor needed” and that the modified behavioral remedies would be sufficient to “effectively pry open to competition” the affected ad-tech markets.

The result continues a pattern in major technology antitrust cases: courts may find serious anticompetitive conduct, but remain reluctant to order breakups or asset sales where the businesses are complex and deeply integrated.

Noteworthy Quotes From Judge Brinkema

• “The core dispute in the remedies phase of this litigation is whether the parties’ essentially overlapping behavioral remedies are sufficient to restore competition … or whether—in addition to those behavioral remedies—there must be structural remedies.”
• “Lack of trust alone or desire for ‘guaranteed certainty’ cannot justify divestiture.”
• “Although an AdX divestiture—in theory—seems like a simple and elegant antitrust remedy, the evidence in the remedies phase shows that it would—in reality—be ‘incredibly messy and highly risky.’”
• “The parties’ proposed behavioral remedies go beyond the enjoining of anticompetitive conduct and prescribe affirmative, forward-looking remedies that seek to ‘eliminat[e] the consequences of [Google’s] illegal conduct.’”

What Comes Next

The final judgment will determine the details of the behavioral regime and how compliance will be monitored. That process matters because the remedy does not change who owns the key assets. It instead attempts to regulate how those assets are used.

That distinction is likely to shape the next phase of the case. The court accepted the idea that conduct rules can restore competition without divestiture. Critics of behavioral remedies will ask whether that is realistic in markets where past conduct helped entrench scale, data, customer relationships, and technical advantages.

For now, Google has avoided the most severe remedy sought by the government. The question is whether the remedies the court did order will restore competition or merely create another long-running supervisory framework for a dominant technology platform.

Edited by Tom Hagy, Editor-in-Chief, Mogin Law Blog.