• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

Google will not be forced to divest its AdX ad exchange, a federal judge who previously ruled the company violated antitrust law said Wednesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia added in a brief written ruling that she will order other antitrust remedies, but has not yet publicly revealed the details.

Wednesday's ruling comes more than one year after Brinkema found that Google harmed consumers as well as publishers by monopolizing key components of the market for serving ads on outside publishers' sites.

The antitrust battle over Google's ad-techn business dates to January 2023, when the Department of Justice and a coalition of states claimed Google “corrupted legitimate competition" by monopolizing markets connected to “open web display advertising” -- which essentially meant programmatic ads served on sites operated by newspapers and other online publishers.

The initial complaint alleged that Google “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising."

Brinkema ruled after a three-week trial that Google monopolized the “publisher ad server market” and the “ad exchange market,” and also illegally tied its ad exchange to DFP (formerly DoubleClick for Publishers).

She dismissed a claim that Google monopolized the “advertiser ad network” market.

Brinkema issued the liability ruling around one year after U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C. ruled against Google in an antitrust lawsuit centered on Google's search engine. 

Mehta said Google violated antitrust law by arranging to serve as the default search engine on browsers operated by Apple and Mozilla, as well as on Android devices.

Mehta's remedy order in that case prohibited Google from entering into "exclusive" distribution contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app for six years, but he rejected the government's request to force the company to divest the Chrome browser and the Android operating system.