Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Justice Department's bid to force Google to sell its AdX ad exchange, accepting behavioral remedies instead — one year after a different judge declined to break up Google's search business. Rhode Island is a plaintiff in both cases.
Uprise RI · Kaelen Valeborn · September 3, 2026
Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Justice Department's bid to force Google to sell its AdX ad exchange, accepting behavioral remedies instead — one year after a different judge declined to break up Google's search business. Rhode Island is a plaintiff in both cases.
Rhode Island joined both federal antitrust cases against Google, and the resulting rules — not breakups — will determine whether local businesses, publishers and users gain real alternatives to Google's search and advertising systems.
The order Judge Leonie Brinkema signed yesterday in the Eastern District of Virginia is brief, and it settles the biggest question in the government's advertising-technology case against Google: no forced sale. The Justice Department had asked her to make Google divest AdX, the ad exchange at the center of its display-advertising business. It also asked her to force Google to open-source the final auction logic inside DFP, its publisher ad server, and to order the remaining DFP assets sold if the first divestiture did not restore competition. She rejected all three . What she accepted, with modifications, was most of the government's list of behavioral remedies — rules about how Google must operate rather than what it must sell.
The opinion explaining those choices is sealed for 14 days so the parties can flag confidential material for redaction. The parties have 30 days to file a joint proposed final judgment.
Rhode Island is one of the states that brought this case. That matters for how readers here should understand the result, and it matters that they understand which case this is. The pitch circulating around yesterday's news — Google escapes a breakup in the search monopoly case — is a year late and a courthouse off. The search ruling came on September 2, 2025, from Judge Amit Mehta in Washington. Yesterday's ruling concerns the plumbing that moves display ads onto open-web pages, a market most Rhode Islanders touch only as readers of websites, not as searchers.
Two cases, two judges, two liability findings against Google, and two refusals to order a breakup. Google lost on the law both times. Google won on the remedy both times. The practical question for a Rhode Island business owner, publisher or ordinary user is whether conduct rules can do what a sale would have done.
The Justice Department, Virginia and seven other states, Rhode Island among them, filed the ad-tech complaint on January 24, 2023. Nine more states joined later. The complaint attacked Google's conduct across the entire stack: the tools publishers use to sell ad space, the tools advertisers use to buy it, and the exchange that matches the two.
Judge Brinkema's April 17, 2025 liability opinion gave the government two of those three. She found that Google unlawfully acquired and maintained monopoly power in the open-web display publisher ad-server market and in the ad-exchange market, and that it unlawfully tied DFP to AdX. She also found the government had not proven a relevant market for open-web display advertiser ad networks. The court's background discussion identified small businesses as one category of digital advertisers using these systems.
That split shapes what anyone can honestly say about yesterday. Google was not cleared. A federal judge has already ruled that it broke the Sherman Act in two markets and illegally bundled two products. Yesterday's order decides only how to fix that — and it decides the fix will be rules, not surgery.
The search litigation started with a Justice Department complaint on October 20, 2020, followed by a separate complaint from Colorado and additional states, including Rhode Island, on December 17, 2020. After a 15-day remedies trial in May 2025, Judge Mehta declined to order Google to sell Chrome or Android, the two divestitures the government wanted most.
What he did order sits in the final judgment entered December 5, 2025, and I read it closely, because the details are where a consumer's stake lives. Google may no longer condition access to Google Play or its other applications on a device maker distributing, placing or licensing Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant or its generative-AI products on U.S. devices. Payments for default placement are not banned outright; the judgment limits how they may be conditioned and generally requires permitted default agreements to expire after one year.
Google must make portions of its Web Search Index and certain user-side data available to qualified competitors, subject to privacy and security protections. The judgment says plainly that this does not require disclosure of algorithms, ranking signals or post-trained large language models. Google must also offer qualified competitors licenses to syndicate its search results — which can include ranked organic results and certain Local, Maps, Video, Images and Knowledge Panel content — and to syndicate its search-text ads. The stated design is to let rivals stand on Google's shoulders while they build their own legs. A five-person technical committee oversees compliance, and a May 4 status report described the work of standing it up.
None of that is final. Google filed its appellant brief in the D.C. Circuit on May 22. The Justice Department and the plaintiff states, Rhode Island included, filed their response and cross-appeal brief on July 28. The briefing schedule runs into September and October, and no oral argument date appears on the docket.
Here the honest answer is narrower than the outrage on either side. The search judgment contains no price cap on advertising. It contains no refund. It does not guarantee any business a better ranking. Google's own Ads documentation says placement in its auction depends on bids, ad quality, context, thresholds, assets and competition; its Business Profile documentation says local results turn principally on relevance, distance and prominence, and that businesses cannot pay for better local ranking. Those are Google's descriptions of Google's systems.
What the search remedies do is aim at the conditions that keep rivals from existing. A competing search engine that can license Google's results and text ads, and pull from its index, has a path to market that did not exist before December. Whether a Rhode Island shop's advertising bill ever moves as a result depends on whether such a competitor emerges and attracts users. That is a bet on the remedy's structure, not a promise in its text.
For the ad-tech side, the behavioral terms Judge Brinkema accepted are the terms that would touch website publishers and the advertisers who reach readers through them. Those terms sit inside the sealed opinion. Until it is unsealed or the joint final judgment is filed, the specific obligations on Google's exchange and ad server are not public.
The American Economic Liberties Project did not wait for the redactions. In a statement yesterday , the group said "judges are just blessing monopolies at this point." Laurel Kilgour and Matt Stoller argued that behavioral remedies will not address Google's market power and called on Congress to impose stronger structural rules on Big Tech.
Google's position is the mirror image, and it deserves a fair hearing. Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president for regulatory affairs, said the company was pleased the court rejected the Justice Department's proposal to break apart tools used by small businesses, according to The Associated Press. Google made the fuller version of that case in a September 19, 2025 statement: forcing a breakup of Google Ad Manager, it argued, would make it harder for publishers to monetize content and more expensive for advertisers to reach customers, with small businesses hurt most.
That is the strongest argument against structural relief, and it is not frivolous — integrated tools do save small operators time and money. But it answers a question the court already resolved. Judge Brinkema found in April 2025 that Google's integration of DFP and AdX was an unlawful tie, not a convenience. The dispute yesterday was never whether the bundle helps some customers; it was whether a company found to have monopolized two markets should keep the assets it used to do it. She said yes, with conditions. The conditions are what Rhode Island's advertisers and publishers now wait on.
A Justice Department spokesperson told the AP the department was pleased with the substantial relief and was evaluating next steps.
Two clocks are running in Virginia. The sealed opinion should become public, in redacted form, in roughly two weeks. The joint proposed final judgment is due within 30 days of yesterday's order. In Washington, the search appeal keeps moving through the fall briefing schedule with Rhode Island's name on the government's side of the caption.
Rhode Island helped bring both cases. It has now watched both end, at the trial level, with Google intact and bound by rules instead of a breakup. The measure of that outcome is not yesterday's order. It is whether, a year from now, a Rhode Islander can find a search engine, a publisher can find an ad exchange, and a small business can find an advertising channel that Google does not own.
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