Judge Rejects Google Breakup, Orders Ad Tech Rule Changes

A federal judge has rejected the U.S. Department of Justice's demand to break up Google's advertising technology business, instead ordering the company to relax its ad auction rules and appoint an internal antitrust compliance monitor for six years. The ruling, issued by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 16, 2026, represents a significant but limited rebuke of the tech giant's market power. In a 106-page decision, Judge Brinkema declined to force Google to sell its AdX ad exchange or divest its DoubleClick for Publishers ad server, remedies the government had argued were necessary to restore competition. Instead, she ordered behavioral changes designed to pry open the ad tech markets she found Google had illegally monopolized. The judge had previously ruled in April 2025 that Google maintained illegal monopolies in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets. The court-ordered remedies require Google to disconnect its publisher ad server from AdX and allow real-time AdX bids to work with competing publisher ad servers. The company must also cease practices that publishers complained locked them into Google's ad tech tools.