Adtech is having quite the week in court.
Following the FTC Amazon lawsuit news from earlier this week, Google has now avoided a forced sale of its AdX ad exchange in the Justice Department’s antitrust case over its adtech business.
Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the government’s proposed structural remedies, including selling AdX and potentially parts of Google’s publisher ad server business. Instead, the court approved most of the proposed changes to how Google must operate its adtech products, with some modifications.
Brinkema previously ruled that Google illegally monopolized the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets.
Why This Matters:
A breakup would have been a dramatic change for the programmatic ad industry. AdX, of course, is core to Google’s sprawling adtech operation, and separating it from the company could have changed the ecosystem from the ground up.
Instead, Google now faces restrictions on how it runs the business while keeping its primary adtech assets together. Those remedies will include changes intended to improve interoperability between Google and competing adtech products.
Ari Paparo had previously predicted this outcome back in November 2025. “I think Google’s going to get their way and there won’t be a spin out,” he wrote at the time in a column for Marketecture.
For now, exactly how those rules will work remains unclear. The court’s detailed opinion is sealed for up to 14 days while the parties review it for potential redactions.
Experts React:
Here are some of the best reactions to the news from X:
Our Take:
This is clearly a better outcome for Google than being forced to sell AdX. More broadly, it means the adtech industry isn’t getting the structural reset that a Google breakup would have caused.
But there’s still a lot we don’t know, with more details to follow. Ultimately, the industry impact will depend on the behavioral remedies and how much they actually change Google’s adtech business.
