The Justice Department's advertising-technology antitrust case against Google, tried in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia before Judge Leonie Brinkema. In April 2025 the court found that Google held illegal monopolies in publisher ad servers and in ad exchanges. On September 2, 2026 Brinkema declined to order Google to sell its AdX advertising exchange, accepting most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies instead (Source: reuters.com). Her 106-page memorandum opinion explaining that decision was unsealed without redactions on September 16, 2026; it sets a six-year decree, overseen by a court-appointed Monitor and a Technical Committee and applying worldwide, that requires Google to open AdX and its DFP ad server to the Prebid header-bidding software and to rival ad servers (United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026)).
Infobox
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Case | United States et al. v. Google LLC, No. 1:23-cv-00108-LMB-JFA |
| Plaintiffs | United States Department of Justice; state attorneys general (Virginia, with Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington and West Virginia) |
| Defendant | Google LLC |
| Court | E.D. Va. (Alexandria), Judge Leonie Brinkema |
| Liability ruling | April 2025 — illegal monopolies in publisher ad servers and ad exchanges; unlawful tie of DFP and AdX; 778 F. Supp. 3d 797 |
| Remedies ruling | September 2, 2026 — divestiture denied; behavioral remedies accepted as modified (order D.E. 1857; memorandum opinion D.E. 1858, unsealed September 16, 2026) |
| Decree term | Six years, effective 60 days after entry of the Final Judgment; worldwide |
| Status | Active; jointly proposed Final Judgment due October 2, 2026 |
The list of plaintiff states is taken from the signature block of the parties' joint notice of September 16, 2026, in which the Virginia Attorney General's office appears as local counsel for the other states (Source: storage.courtlistener.com).
Liability findings
The court found after a bench trial that Google violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act by willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power in the worldwide publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising, and by tying its DFP publisher ad server to its AdX exchange through contractual policies and technological integration. It also found anticompetitive the First Look, Last Look and Unified Pricing Rules policies. A count alleging monopolization of an advertiser ad network market was dismissed, and Google's acquisitions of DoubleClick and Admeld were found not anticompetitive in isolation. The remedies opinion records findings that AdX handled 63 to 71 percent of worldwide open-web display exchange transactions among exchanges producing data from 2018 to 2022 while charging a 20 percent take rate, and that DFP held 91 percent of the publisher ad server market in 2022 (United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026)).
Procedural history
After the April 2025 liability ruling the parties took four months of remedies discovery, and the court held an 11-day remedies bench trial with 26 witnesses and more than 100 exhibits, with closing arguments on November 21, 2025 (United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026)). PPC Land reported that the government's final remedies proposal of November 3, 2025 asked for AdX to be sold within twelve months, and that Google removed Unified Pricing Rules from Ad Manager in December 2025, before any remedy was ordered (Source: ppc.land).
The order itself is two pages, entered September 2, 2026 in Case 1:23-cv-108, sixteen months after the April 2025 liability finding. It rejects all three structural remedies the Justice Department sought — divestiture of AdX, open-sourcing of DFP's final auction logic, and contingent divestiture of DFP Remainder — and accepts most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies as modified by the court. The reasoning sits in a memorandum opinion sealed for fourteen days, with redaction motions due September 16, 2026 and a jointly proposed final judgment due October 2, 2026 (Source: ppc.land; theinformation.com). On September 16, 2026 Google and the plaintiffs jointly notified the court that none of them believed any redactions were necessary and that they knew of no protected third-party material in the opinion (Source: storage.courtlistener.com), and Brinkema unsealed the full opinion the same day (United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026)).
Remedy
The government sought divestiture of AdX, the exchange side of Google's advertising stack. The court declined and adopted most of the behavioral remedies the parties had proposed. Reuters characterized the outcome as the third consecutive rejection of a United States bid to break up a large technology company, following the Meta and Google search rulings (Source: reuters.com).
Why the structural remedies were rejected
The memorandum opinion holds that "structural remedies are neither realistic nor needed." Its principal grounds, as set out in United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026), are:
- Precedent and burden. Where the violation is "an unlawful tie among integrated technology assets, divestiture is unprecedented"; courts in tying cases have not ordered divestiture of the tying or tied product, and the plaintiffs had not shown behavioral remedies would be ineffective.
- Trust. The court finds that "the essence of Plaintiffs' rationale for seeking divestiture boils down to a lack of trust that Google will comply with an Order from this Court and an unrealistic desire for certainty," which cannot justify divestiture. It describes Google as held in check by "two swords of Damocles": the court-supervised injunction and the private suits pending against it.
- No buyer and no workable timeline. The plaintiffs identified no viable AdX acquirer. AdX and DFP have been integrated for over 17 years with Google infrastructure running to more than 100 million lines of code, and the court finds the plaintiffs' migration timelines unrealistic against comparators such as the seven-year migration of DoubleClick onto Google's systems. Divestiture would take years, while the behavioral remedies would be in effect within 15 months.
- Tailoring and causation. AdX and DFP carry ad formats beyond the open-web display markets at issue; the plaintiffs never argued at the liability stage that DFP's "final auction logic" was anticompetitive, which alone defeats the open-sourcing proposal; and lawful conduct, including Search-derived AdWords demand and approved acquisitions, contributed to Google's position, so the heightened causal connection required for structural relief was not shown, though the court calls the question "arguably closer" than in the Microsoft and Google search cases.
Behavioral remedies adopted
- An injunction against enforcing or recreating the DFP–AdX tie, against reimplementing First Look or Last Look, and requiring Unified Pricing Rules to be deprecated for all indirect transaction types.
- Interfaces letting Prebid solicit AdX real-time bids for all indirect open-web display inventory and letting DFP publishers route all indirect and programmatic direct demand through Prebid, on materially identical terms and without added latency; and AdX real-time bids to rival publisher ad servers in the same manner as to DFP.
- Data sharing to publishers of DFP historical and configuration data and AdX winning and losing bid data, exportable to rival ad servers, limited to open-web display.
- DFP technical documentation and per-ad data files explaining how DFP selects the winning ad, adopted in place of open-sourcing.
- Non-discrimination in data signals, bidding and ad serving, including a bar on payment for preferential routing, with specific terms and privacy carve-outs to be drafted by the parties.
- Buy-side limits on AdWords but not DV360: no direct AdWords–DFP bidding integration (AdWords may integrate directly with Prebid), no bidding or routing based on Google ownership except for defined advertiser return-on-investment factors, and non-discriminatory use of Google first-party data.
- A Monitor chosen from a slate of three and appointed by the court, a three-member Technical Committee, an Internal Compliance Officer, quarterly Monitor reports, a status report within 90 days of the effective date, affidavits every 30 days until the Monitor is appointed, and compliance inspections. Google receives a "broad right to object" to the Monitor's findings, following Judge Amit Mehta's approach in the search case.
The court rejected the plaintiffs' anti-retaliation, non-interference and anti-circumvention provisions as too vague, a monitored escrow account funded by 50 percent of AdX and DFP net revenues, and a legal and ethical compliance program. It adopted Google's six-year term over the plaintiffs' fifteen, with authority to extend it, set the effective date at 60 days after entry, and applied the decree worldwide over Google's comity objection because the relevant markets are worldwide (United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026)). PPC Land's account of the unsealed opinion reports the same term, monitor, interoperability and worldwide scope (Source: ppc.land).
Artificial intelligence in the remedy decision
The opinion finds that AI "has not yet had such a disruptive impact on the ad tech industry," contrasting the search court's view of generative AI in search, while recording early efforts to place ads inside AI chat interfaces that "could threaten the stability and growth of traditional open-web display ads." It relies on AI and supply-path optimization in two places: as "imminent industry disruptions" that could outstrip a years-long, two-step divestiture, and in rejecting the fifteen-year term, stating that "the rapid emergence of AI and supply-path optimization are likely to dramatically change the industry" (United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026)). The Information's briefing on the release highlighted the AI passage (Source: theinformation.com). See AI Antitrust.
Related proceedings
The pattern connects the case to United States v. Google (Search), where Judge Amit Mehta's December 2025 final judgment likewise imposed a conduct framework rather than a Chrome divestiture. The ad tech remedies opinion follows that decision on the six-year term, the Technical Committee, Google's right to object, the 60-day effective date and the rejection of vaguely worded anti-retaliation provisions (United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026)). It also supplies context for the remedies available in FTC v. Amazon (advertising auctions), the FTC's separate deception case over Amazon's advertising auctions, in which the prayer seeks a permanent injunction and monetary relief rather than structural separation.
The opinion cites follow-on private suits against Google in the Southern District of New York by PubMatic (No. 1:25-cv-10819), OpenX (No. 1:25-cv-10817), Magnite (No. 1:25-cv-10818), Equativ (No. 1:26-cv-140), Index Exchange (No. 1:25-cv-10477) and Gannett (No. 1:23-cv-5177) (United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026)). PPC Land additionally lists suits by The Atlantic and, on August 3, 2026, Teads, and reports that the European Commission fined Google €2.95 billion on September 5, 2025 for self-preferencing across the same ad tech products and published a provisional public version of that decision on January 14, 2026 while still weighing structural relief (Source: ppc.land).
Current status
As of September 17, 2026 the remedies opinion is public and no final judgment has been entered. Under the September 2 order the parties must file one jointly proposed Final Judgment by October 2, 2026, setting out any still-disputed provision in both versions, labeled by proponent and without argument; the court will say whether further briefing or argument is needed. Several terms are left to the parties to settle in that filing: the specific non-discrimination provisions, the deadline for AdX interoperability with rival ad servers, the factors within the advertiser return-on-investment exception, the format and frequency of DFP technical documentation, and the duties of the Internal Compliance Officer (United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026)).
Open questions
- Whether the Justice Department or the plaintiff states will appeal the denial of structural relief, or Google the behavioral decree, is not reported.
- Which party proposes the slate of Monitor candidates and which selects is described in the opinion as the parties' main disagreement on monitoring; the opinion does not state how it is resolved.
Relationships
- supports: United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va.) — Memorandum Opinion on Remedies (Brinkema, September 2026) — primary text of the September 2026 remedies ruling
- related: United States v. Google (Search) — the parallel search-monopolization case against the same defendant, whose remedies decision the ad tech opinion follows on term and oversight
- related: FTC v. Amazon (advertising auctions) — contemporaneous federal enforcement over an automated advertising auction
- related: Algorithmic Pricing and Antitrust — the enforcement theory applied to automated advertising markets
- instance-of: AI Antitrust — a monopolization remedy in which AI was weighed as a factor in the decree's length
- related: Google DeepMind — Google's AI arm; the ad-tech stack is a separate business