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Judge rejects US bid to force sale

September 3, 2026

A judge in Virginia rejected the justice department's attempt to force a sale of Google's online advertising exchange and ordered changes to the ad tech unit.

The Guardian reports that Alphabet's Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected the attempt by US antitrust enforcers to force a sale of Google's online advertising exchange. Bloomberg.com ties the same outcome to court-ordered changes at the ad tech unit rather than a sale. The Financial Times carries the account in the same terms. On the substance the three agree: the exchange stays with Google, and the remedy is conduct, not divestiture.

The figures sit with The Guardian, corroborated by Bloomberg.com and the Financial Times. Ad Manager represented 4.1% of Google's overall revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020, according to Wedbush research and analysis of court documents, and more recent figures were redacted. The justice department and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and would hurt customers through a long and painful transition. Judge Brinkema had earlier found that the company's anticompetitive conduct “substantially harmed ‌Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web”.

The reading the coverage shares is one of scale against symbolism. The exchange is a small part of Google's business, yet the ruling is the second victory for the company against the Department of Justice in its push to make Google sell assets to address illegal monopolies, after a judge in Washington declined to make it sell the Chrome browser and cited rising competition from generative artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. What is settled is the ruling and the numbers behind the unit's size. What is not is whether courts can check the industry's power over the US economy, a question the coverage raises without answering.

Still developing

The accounts give the same reading of the Virginia ruling, and no different figure or framing appears in the record by the time of draft.

How settled the reporting is

Reported 100% · Contested 0% · Developing 0%

Sources