Law & Regulation

Google Escapes Breakup - Brussels Still Watching

US Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected a Google ad-tech breakup on September 2, 2026, opting for behavioral remedies instead. For EU publishers and DMA compliance teams, the ruling raises a real question about Brussels' own ad-tech case against Google.

Law & RegulationBy Servola Tech Desk2026-09-034 min read

AI-assisted, edited by humans. | Editor-in-Chief: Leon Soliman | Editorial standards

Google Escapes Breakup - Brussels Still Watching

Photo: Courthousenews

What Judge Brinkema ruled on September 2, 2026

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia rejected the Department of Justice's request to break up Google's advertising technology business on Wednesday, September 2, 2026.

The Justice Department had asked the court to force Google to divest AdX, its ad exchange, to open-source the final auction logic inside DoubleClick for Publishers, known as DFP, and to order a contingent divestiture of what the government called the "DFP Remainder." Brinkema declined all three requests. Courthouse News and Axios both reported the ruling within hours, and Bloomberg's account of it circulated widely on Techmeme the same day.

What the Justice Department asked for, and did not get

The Justice Department's remedies proposal sought a full structural breakup of the ad-tech stack Google assembled by acquiring DoubleClick, AdMeld and other rivals over nearly two decades.

Divestiture of AdX would have forced Google to sell the auction house where publisher ad space and advertiser demand actually meet. Open-sourcing DFP's final auction logic would have let rival ad servers see and compete against the rules Google's own exchange runs on. A contingent divestiture of the "DFP Remainder," the publisher ad-serving business left over after any AdX sale, was the fallback the government wanted if the first two orders failed to restore real competition. Brinkema's opinion rejected each of them.

Behavioral remedies, not a breakup, are coming instead

Behavioral remedies are the substitute Brinkema is expected to order, meaning conduct rules and reporting obligations rather than a forced sale of any Google business unit.

Google and the Justice Department must now file a joint proposed final judgment within 30 days of the ruling, a document that will spell out exactly which practices Google must change, monitor or report on. Antitrust lawyers generally describe behavioral remedies as easier to write and enforce line by line, but far easier for a dominant company to work around than losing ownership of the asset itself.

The April 2025 finding of liability has not changed

Liability was decided more than a year before this ruling, when the same Alexandria courtroom found in April 2025 that Google had illegally monopolized open-web ad-tech markets and substantially harmed publishers through its control of both the exchange and the server sides of the auction.

Wednesday's decision addressed remedies only, the second and separate phase of the case. Google remains a company a federal court has found guilty of illegal monopolization; the only question this ruling settled is what the company must now do about it, and the answer is far less than the Justice Department wanted.

Why the EU bet on structure instead of behavior

The European Commission reached its own preliminary conclusion about Google's ad-tech conflicts of interest in 2023, when its Statement of Objections took the position that only a divestment of parts of Google's ad-tech business could adequately fix the competition problems it had identified.

That preliminary finding sits behind the wider logic of the Digital Markets Act, which was built to write structural obligations for designated gatekeepers directly into law rather than negotiate conduct commitments case by case after years of litigation. The Commission has already designated several Google services as gatekeepers under the DMA, and its separate ad-tech investigation, opened in 2021, continues to run on that structural premise even after Wednesday's ruling in Virginia.

What EU publishers and ad-tech buyers should actually expect

EU publishers should not read Wednesday's ruling as a preview of their own outcome, because the European Commission's enforcement against Google runs on different legal machinery than a US district court applying US antitrust law.

The practical read for European publishers, ad-tech buyers and DMA compliance teams is that open, unbundled access to Google's ad exchange is not something this US case delivers, and it was never going to, given what Brinkema just declined to order. The Commission's own gatekeeper obligations and its 2023 divestment finding, not this Virginia judgment, remain the live lever for EU market structure, and European publishers watching for real change to Google's ad-tech stack should keep their attention on Brussels rather than Alexandria.

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Frequently asked questions

Does this US ruling affect the EU's DMA case against Google?

Not directly. Judge Brinkema's decision applies US antitrust law inside one federal case, while the European Commission's Digital Markets Act obligations for Google's ad-tech business are enforced under separate EU law and continue regardless of what a Virginia court orders.

What exactly did the Justice Department ask for, and what did the judge reject?

The Justice Department sought divestiture of AdX, open-sourcing of DFP's final auction logic, and a contingent divestiture of the "DFP Remainder." Judge Brinkema rejected all three and is expected to order behavioral remedies instead.

What happens next in the US case?

Google and the Justice Department must file a joint proposed final judgment within 30 days of the September 2, 2026 ruling, setting out the specific behavioral remedies Google will operate under.

Why has the European Commission favored divestment when the US court just rejected it?

The Commission's 2023 Statement of Objections concluded that Google's conflicts of interest across the ad exchange and ad server it owns could only be adequately fixed by divesting part of the business, a structural view that predates and differs from Wednesday's US remedies ruling.

Google was found guilty of illegally monopolizing ad-tech in April 2025, and eighteen months later it keeps every piece of the business that made it guilty. That outcome is exactly what the European Commission's own 2023 findings warned behavioral fixes cannot deliver: real change to a company's structural conflicts of interest. EU publishers and ad-tech buyers hoping this case would force open access to Google's ad exchange now know that relief, if it comes, has to come from Brussels' own structural authority, not from a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia.

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