Google Escapes Breakup as US Court Orders Behavioral Fixes in Ad Tech Monopoly Case
A federal court in the US has rejected the government's calls to break up Alphabet (GOOGL) and its subsidiary Google, ruling against a breakup of the company's ad exchange or open-sourcing its auction logic.
The decision, which follows a landmark antitrust case, marks the second time within a year that a federal judge has refused to force Google to divest itself of its ad tech business. In April 2025, Judge Leonie Brinkema found that Google had monopolized two worldwide markets for open-web display advertising with its products DFP and AdX.
The court's order requires Google to implement behavioral remedies, including prohibiting the use of Unified Pricing Rules for indirect transactions and allowing publishers to export their data to competing ad servers. Google must also build integrations that allow Prebid, an open-source header bidding platform, to solicit real-time AdX bids for all indirect open-web display inventory.
The court's rejection of divestiture relied on the DC Circuit's decision in Microsoft, which requires a 'significant causal connection' between unlawful conduct and the monopoly. The plaintiffs never identified a viable buyer for AdX, which is deeply integrated with Google infrastructure spanning over 100 million lines of code.