GOOGL Wins Big In Antitrust Fight — Judge Blocks DOJ’s Push To Break Up Google’s Ad Business

• Google avoided a forced sale of its AdX advertising exchange after a Virginia judge rejected the DOJ’s breakup bid.
• Judge Leonie Brinkema instead accepted most of the proposed behavioral remedies, with the full redacted decision due later this month.
• The decision marks another antitrust win for Google, following a separate ruling that allowed the company to keep its Chrome browser.

Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOGL) Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday after a Virginia judge reportedly rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers’ bid to force a sale of the company’s online advertising exchange. While AdX is a small part of Google’s business, the decision marks a second powerful symbolic victory for the tech giant against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in its efforts to force Google to sell assets over antitrust concerns, Reuters reported.

GOOGL shares were up nearly 1% at the time of writing on Wednesday.

Judge Rejects AdX Sale

U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to make Google sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies, according to the report.

“Most of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies, as modified by this court, be and are accepted,” Brinkema wrote in her order. The full decision, with redactions, will be released later this month, according to a separate Bloomberg report.

Google’s Ad-Tech Monopoly

The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites.

In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges that sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found, according to Reuters.

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.

DOJ Pushed For Sale

At a 2025 trial on remedies in the case, the DOJ stated that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior. Google added that a forced sale would be technically difficult and would result in a long, painful transition that would hurt customers.

The company also sought to show that the DOJ’s demand differed from Google’s prior offer to sell AdX to the DOJ to end an EU antitrust investigation, as reported by Reuters in 2024.

Wednesday’s decision is a win for Google, which avoided a breakup in the Justice Department’s first antitrust case over its monopoly in the online search market. There, a federal judge in Washington ruled that Google doesn’t have to sell off its popular Chrome web browser and instead must make some of the data underlying its search results available to rivals, according to the Bloomberg report.

GOOGL Stock: Stocktwits Retail Sentiment

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for GOOGL remained ‘bearish,’ unchanged over the past 24 hours, while message volume was ‘normal’ at the time of writing.

GOOGL stock has gained over 8% year-to-date.

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