ALEXANDRIA, Virginia: Google will not have to sell its online advertising exchange after a U.S. judge on September 2 rejected an attempt by antitrust enforcers to break up part of the technology giant's advertising business.

U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to order Google to sell AdX, where publishers pay the company a 20 percent fee to sell ads through auctions that take place instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the behavioral remedies proposed by the parties.

The decision marks the second symbolic victory for Google against the U.S. Department of Justice's efforts to force the company to sell assets to address illegal monopolies, although the ad exchange represents a small part of Google's overall business.

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

In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google held illegal monopolies in servers that host publisher advertisements and ad exchanges that connect buyers and sellers. She found that Google unlawfully tied publishers using its ad server to its AdX exchange.

The company'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.

During a trial last year over remedies, the Justice Department argued that Google could not be trusted to operate AdX because of its past behavior.

Google countered that forcing a sale would be technically difficult and lead to a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. The company also sought to distinguish the government's demand from Google's previous offer to sell AdX to resolve a European Union antitrust investigation.

Ad Manager accounted for 4.1 percent of Google's overall revenue and 1.5 percent of operating profit in 2020, according to Wedbush research and an analysis of court documents. More recent figures were redacted.

Wednesday's decision is the third consecutive instance in which a judge has rejected an effort by U.S. antitrust authorities to break up a major technology company.

A federal judge last year rejected the Federal Trade Commission's attempt to force Meta Platforms to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, finding that the agency had failed to prove Meta held a monopoly.

Another judge, after finding Google held an illegal monopoly in online search, rejected the Justice Department's attempt to force a sale of its Chrome browser, citing growing competition from generative artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

U.S. antitrust cases against Amazon and Apple are not expected to go to trial until at least 2027.