Google will not have to sell off its ad exchange, AdX, despite a federal court ruling earlier this year that found the company's publisher ad server and ad exchange constituted illegal digital ad monopolies.

US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema announced the opinion in US v. Google yesterday. Her decision rejects a Department of Justice proposal that would have forced Google to divest AdX and open-source portions of its auction logic.

Google will still face other remedies. Brinkema's full opinion, which will likely contain further detail on what the company must do, is set to be unsealed in two weeks. During the trial's remedy phase, Google itself proposed changes to its publisher contracts and offered to make its ad tech more interoperable with competing ad servers, among other remedies.

The ruling has been pending since November, when remedy proceedings concluded with closing arguments. Both Google and the DOJ had put forward their own versions of remedies for the court to consider.

What analysts are saying

Nikhil Lai, principal analyst at Forrester, said the outcome signals a limit on how far courts will go in restructuring digital advertising businesses.

"What [the ruling] shows is that structural remedies like breaking up a company or forcing a company to divest a division are not going to work," Lai told Marketing Brew. "In the case of ad tech, they're too operationally complex to actually do, and maybe they're not serving consumer welfare, which is the whole point of antitrust law."

Google welcomed the decision. "We're very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ's proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow," Lee-Anne Mulholland, VP of regulatory affairs at Google, said in a statement provided to Marketing Brew by Google spokesperson Jackie Berté.

The DOJ's Antitrust Division struck a more positive tone than the outcome might suggest. In a post on X, the agency said it "is pleased that the court ordered substantial relief in the Google ad-tech case. We are one step closer to restoring competition and bringing relief for the American people in online advertising markets."

A pattern of scrutiny

The ad-tech case is not Google's only antitrust battle, and it is not the only recent example of the federal government targeting Big Tech advertising businesses.

In the search monopoly case brought by the DOJ, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled last September that Google must share online search data with competitors — but stopped short of more far-reaching measures. Google is appealing that ruling.

Earlier this week, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon, claiming the company "engaged in deceptive and unfair practices that secretly inflated prices in its online search advertising auctions." Amazon responded in a statement on its website that it "strongly disagrees" with the FTC's claims.

For marketers and publishers, Brinkema's ruling means the structural shape of the programmatic supply chain stays intact for now. The practical consequences for ad buying, publisher contracts, and interoperability between ad servers will become clearer when the full opinion is unsealed.

Source: Marketing Brew (https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/google-ad-tech-adx-monopoly-ruling-behavioral-remedies?utm_source=&utm_medium=syndication&utm_campaign=feed)