TL;DR
- Judge Leonie M. Brinkema rejected all three of the DOJ's structural remedies against Google on 2 September 2026, including the divestiture of AdX and the open-sourcing of DFP's final auction logic.
- The court accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioural remedies as modified, but the reasoning sits in a Memorandum Opinion filed under seal, so the specific obligations are not public.
- The parties have 14 days to move for redactions, on 16 September 2026, and 30 days to file one jointly proposed Final Judgment, by 2 October 2026.
- Google Ad Manager stays a single integrated product, AdX and DFP stay under one owner and the take rate is unchanged, so nothing moves in advertiser accounts this month.
Judge Leonie M. Brinkema refused every structural remedy the United States Department of Justice had asked for against Google's advertising technology business on 2 September 2026, rejecting the proposed sale of AdX and accepting most of the parties' behavioural remedies instead, as modified by the court. The decision arrived as a two-page order entered in the Eastern District of Virginia and filed on the public docket as Document 1857 in Case 1:23-cv-108 (LMB/JFA). The reasoning sits in an accompanying Memorandum Opinion that was filed under seal, so the result is public and the explanation is not.
What the two-page order actually says
The order disposes of the remedies phase of United States of America et al. v. Google LLC in two operative sentences. According to PPC Land, which reported the filing, the order states that the plaintiffs' proposals for structural remedies in the form of the divestiture of AdX, the open-sourcing of DFP's final auction logic and the contingent divestiture of DFP Remainder "be and are REJECTED", with the capitalisation belonging to the court. The line immediately after records that most of the parties' proposed behavioural remedies, as modified by the court, "be and are ACCEPTED."
Nothing else in the public document explains the outcome. The order points to the accompanying Memorandum Opinion, which nobody outside chambers and counsel of record can currently read. Sixteen months after the liability ruling of 17 April 2025, and more than nine months after closing arguments on 21 November 2025, the market has a result without a rationale. PPC Land notes that a ruling had been expected in January or February 2026 and arrived in September.
The three structural remedies the court rejected
The rejected package was not one idea. It was three separate mechanisms, each aimed at a different layer of the stack the court had already condemned in April 2025.
Divestiture of AdX
The Justice Department sought a sale of AdX within twelve months of final judgment, a demand set out in its final post-trial brief filed on 3 November 2025. AdX is the exchange where publishers pay roughly a fifth of gross revenue for access to demand originating in Google Ads, and its fee structure sat at the centre of the liability findings. That sale is now off the table in this court.
Open-sourcing DFP's final auction logic
DoubleClick for Publishers, rebranded inside Google Ad Manager in 2018, decides which advertisement fills a slot. Publishing the code that governs that last decision would have removed the informational asymmetry the government argued allowed Google to favour its own exchange. Testimony during the trial put the engineering cost of that exercise at roughly two years, with a software expert estimating 24 months for the open-sourcing work and 18 months for the data migration APIs.
Contingent divestiture of DFP Remainder
The third proposal was an enforcement backstop. If the first two measures failed to produce competition inside a defined window, the rest of the publisher ad server would go as well. It was written to answer the objection that conduct rules decay over time. It was rejected alongside the other two.
What the sealed Memorandum Opinion still hides
The order does not enumerate which behavioural remedies survived, which did not, or what the court changed. The word "most" carries the weight and none of the detail, and the modifications are described only as those imposed in the accompanying opinion, which remains sealed. PPC Land reports that a significant volume of sealed material was referenced at trial, which is the stated basis for the delay in publishing the reasoning.
That gap matters because the two behavioural packages on the table were substantially different from each other. Google's own filing offered to make real-time bidding responses from AdX available to rival publisher ad servers, to remove Unified Pricing Rules and to accept a monitoring trustee, with the company arguing for a three-year supervision period and later signalling openness to a longer one. The government's version ran to ten years of restrictions and enumerated the re-monopolisation routes it wanted policed, among them latency manipulation, signal alteration, algorithmic changes, differential pricing and bid volume limits. Which of those obligations made it into the accepted set cannot be read off the order.
The order also sets no implementation date, names no trustee and fixes no duration. Those terms belong to a Final Judgment that does not yet exist. Anyone describing today what Google is now obliged to do in Google Ad Manager is describing a document nobody has written.
Two deadlines are now running
The order starts two countdowns, and PPC Land reports that they run in parallel rather than in sequence. The dates below come from the filing as the source described it.
| Date | Event | What the source says about it |
|---|---|---|
| 17 April 2025 | Liability ruling | The court found Google had illegally monopolized the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising and had unlawfully tied them, under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act |
| 2 September 2026 | Remedies order entered | All three structural remedies rejected, most behavioural remedies accepted as modified, reasoning filed under seal |
| 16 September 2026 | Redaction deadline, 14 days | Parties must move for any redactions to the Memorandum Opinion, kept to a minimum and supported by sound reasons, or it is unsealed automatically |
| 2 October 2026 | Final Judgment deadline, 30 days | Parties meet, confer and file one jointly proposed Final Judgment, with unresolved provisions carrying both versions labelled as to the proponent and no argument attached |
The redaction clock is the one that decides how much the industry learns. If no motion is filed, the opinion is unsealed automatically. If the court finds requested redactions meritorious, the opinion stays under seal and a redacted version is filed publicly, which means the reasoning behind the rejection of divestiture could reach the market roughly two weeks after the result and possibly with holes in it.
Nothing in your ad stack changes this month
For media buyers and publishers, the immediate answer is that the supply path looks exactly as it did the day before the ruling. Google Ad Manager remains a single integrated product. AdX and DFP stay under one owner. The take rate is unchanged. Any migration plan that was built on the assumption of a forced separation now rests on a premise the court has removed.
It is worth separating litigation risk from operational change here. Some conduct-level movement had already happened without a judgment. Google removed Unified Pricing Rules from Ad Manager in December 2025 under antitrust pressure, restoring the ability to set different floors for individual buyers, a capability the 2019 shift to a first price auction had eliminated. That reversal arrived nine months before any remedies order, which shows both what litigation pressure produces on its own and how little a judgment adds once a defendant has started conceding on its own timetable.
Advertisers running Google Ads campaigns against open-web inventory will see no change to bidding, billing or reporting from this order, because the accepted behavioural remedies have no operative text yet. The same holds for retailers whose ecommerce marketing leans on display and remarketing reach across the open web. The order rearranged an expectation, not an auction.
The cases this order does not touch
The European Commission fined Google 2.95 billion euros on 5 September 2025 in Case AT.40670 and ordered the company to end self-preferencing and address what it called an inherent conflict of interest. Google rejected the divestiture prescription on 13 November 2025 and offered product changes instead, including buyer-specific price floors in Ad Manager and longer-term interoperability commitments. The Commission published the provisional public version of the decision on 14 January 2026 while market testing those behavioural proposals, and Google and Alphabet filed an annulment action with the General Court two days earlier.
Thomas Hoeppner, a competition lawyer and partner at Geradin Partners who has litigated against Google in European proceedings, read the Virginia order as a denial rather than a resolution and said his interest lay in why the judge concluded behavioural remedies alone would be sufficient. He also argued the ruling shifts structural hopes onto the Commission's parallel case while probably chilling it. PPC Land frames that second point as a contested proposition rather than an established one. Nothing in a Virginia district court order binds a European regulator, and the Commission's case rests on a different legal instrument, a different evidentiary record and a different market definition.
The follow-on damages wave is also unaffected, because it has been proceeding on the strength of the April 2025 liability findings rather than the remedy. On 27 October 2025 the Southern District of New York gave preclusive effect to the Virginia findings, so private plaintiffs there argue injury and quantum instead of proving conduct again. OpenX filed in August 2025, PubMatic and Magnite in September, Raptive in October on behalf of more than 6,000 websites, and Index Exchange in November. Vox Media and The Atlantic Monthly Group both filed on 14 January 2026. Teads sued on 3 August 2026, claiming 6.88 trillion impressions were diverted from rival exchanges. In the United Kingdom the Competition Appeal Tribunal certified an opt-out claim covering search advertisers between 2011 and 2025, and the Stockholm Patent and Market Court ordered Google to pay damages to Klarna on 1 July 2026 over Shopping self-preferencing. The economics of those claims do not depend on whether AdX changes hands.
What this means for Thai marketers
No line of this order reaches a Thai advertiser's account, and the source says nothing about Thailand. What changes is a planning assumption. Anyone who had pencilled in a structurally different exchange market for 2027, and had been treating a forced AdX sale as a scheduled event, no longer has a court-ordered basis for that expectation in the United States.
The practical read is that the constraint on Google's ad tech conduct will be a set of rules with unknown content, unknown duration and no named trustee until the Final Judgment is entered. Rules of that shape are usually easier to absorb into a media plan than a divestiture, because inventory keeps flowing through the same pipes and no counterparty has to be re-onboarded. They are also much harder to verify from the outside, which argues for measuring the supply path you actually buy rather than reading remedy coverage as a forecast.
For teams whose open-web display performance has been drifting, the more useful diagnostic is first-party. Document what your demand path looks like now: which exchanges your spend clears through, what fees your platform contracts disclose, and how much of your reach depends on Google-owned infrastructure. Alphabet reported that Google Network revenue, the line item covering third-party advertising through the contested stack, fell 4% year over year in the first quarter of 2026 to 6.97 billion dollars, a decline PPC Land attributes to traffic shifts rather than to any remedy. Brands rebalancing towards owned channels and SEO in Thailand are responding to that traffic shift, not to the antitrust case, and this ruling gives them no reason to stop.
FAQ on the AdX divestiture ruling
Does Google have to sell AdX?
No. Judge Brinkema rejected the divestiture of AdX on 2 September 2026, together with the open-sourcing of DFP's final auction logic and the contingent divestiture of DFP Remainder, so Google keeps the assets at issue. The court accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioural remedies instead, as modified by the court.
What exactly are the behavioural remedies that were accepted?
The order does not say, and that is the central unknown. It records only that most of the proposed behavioural remedies were accepted as modified, and leaves the content to the sealed Memorandum Opinion, so the specific obligations are not public until that opinion is unsealed or the Final Judgment is filed.
When does the court's reasoning become public?
The parties have 14 days from 2 September 2026 to move for redactions, which puts that deadline at 16 September 2026 on the source's timeline. If nobody files, the opinion is unsealed automatically; if the court grants redactions, a redacted version is filed publicly and the remainder stays sealed.
Does this change anything in campaigns running from Thailand right now?
No. The order changes nothing operational in Google Ads or Google Ad Manager this month, because the accepted behavioural remedies have no operative text until a Final Judgment is entered, and that filing is due within 30 days of 2 September 2026.
Is the case finished?
No. A Final Judgment still has to be drafted and entered, the European Commission's parallel proceeding in Case AT.40670 continues, and Google has said since April 2025 that it intends to pursue an appeal on liability.
What to watch next
Two dates carry the information. If the Memorandum Opinion is unsealed on or around 16 September 2026, the reasoning for rejecting divestiture becomes readable and the strength of the accepted package becomes assessable for the first time. If the jointly proposed Final Judgment lands by 2 October 2026, the labelled disagreements inside it will show precisely where the parties still differ, which is usually a better guide to how much bite a remedy has than the order announcing it. Until one of those documents appears, any confident claim about what Google must now do is speculation.
If open-web display carries real weight in your media mix, this is a sensible month to write down your current supply path, fee disclosures and Google-dependency so there is a baseline to measure against when the conduct rules finally become public. Anyone who wants a second pair of eyes on that baseline is welcome to get in touch.
