Google avoids splitting its advertising technology business

Google has dodged a judicial bullet that posed a very serious threat to its business model. And this is not an isolated event: it is the third time U.S. regulators have failed in their attempt to force the breakup of a Big Tech company. Meta avoided having to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, Google avoided having to sell Chrome… and now Google has avoided having to sell AdX.

But let us add a bit of context to the story.

In May 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice had proposed a series of sanctions and measures to put an end to Google’s anticompetitive practices in the digital advertising market. The proposal went beyond simple financial penalties and focused on splitting up key Google assets and banning practices that unfairly favored its products.

And some of those measures threatened Google’s business model.

One of the most drastic proposals was the separation of the platform used by digital media outlets and websites to manage available ad inventory (DFP) and the digital marketplace where publishers’ ad space is auctioned (AdX). At the time, the Department of Justice argued that AdX is a central tool in Google’s monopoly, because by tying it closely to AdWords, Google’s ad-buying system, the company had managed to restrict competition.

For that reason, it proposed that Google divest AdX and sell it to competitors, while also calling for a phased separation of DFP.

A new ruling eases the pressure on Google

In her ruling, the judge rejected the harshest structural measures sought by the plaintiffs against Google: therefore, there will be no sale of AdX, Google will not be required to open the code behind DFP’s final auction logic, and a later sale of DFP is not being considered either.

Instead, the court opted for what it calls behavioral remedies, accepting a large portion of the parties’ proposals while introducing modifications of its own, although it has not yet detailed what those will entail. That part is set out in a separate memorandum that will remain under seal for fourteen days.

In addition, the judge gave the parties 30 days to jointly submit a proposed final judgment reflecting those remedies and identifying the points on which disagreement still remains.

“We are very pleased that the court rejected the Department of Justice’s proposal to dismantle the tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, in comments to Bloomberg.

So now we have to wait and see what those measures actually look like. Looking back to 2025, Google had already expressed its disagreement at the time with the proposal to break up the company and put forward a series of measures that would address the lawsuit and make competition easier. Among them was improving the availability of AdX real-time bids for third-party ad servers, which would allow other ad servers to access AdX real-time bids for ads across the open web. Another proposal included eliminating unified pricing rules for ads on the open web, which would allow publishers to set different prices for different bidders, giving publishers more flexibility in their pricing strategies.

We will have to wait a few days to see whether the final measures head in that direction.

Image: ChatGPT