Google Keeps Its Ad Exchange. What the Judge Ordered

On September 2, 2026 Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia entered Document 1857 in United States of America et al. v. Google LLC, case 1:23-cv-108 (LMB/JFA). It is two pages long. It rejects the divestiture of AdX, the open-sourcing of DFP’s final auction logic and the contingent divestiture of what the filings call DFP Remainder. It accepts most of the parties’ proposed behavioural remedies, as modified by the court. Everything else is in a memorandum opinion filed under seal.

That makes this a different kind of post from the coverage. The coverage described what Google must now do. The order does not. It sets two deadlines, one for redactions and one for a joint final judgment, and until those pass, no obligation on Google has been published by the court. Publishers and advertisers reading the headlines should know exactly which parts are known and which are inferred, because their contracts will be renegotiated on the difference.

The order is on the public docket and in the RECAP archive maintained by the Free Law Project, where we read it. Its operative text is four ordered paragraphs and one footnote, and it can be summarised without interpretation.

Three words carry the whole outcome. “Most” means some proposed behavioural remedies were not accepted, and the order does not say which. “Modified” means the accepted ones do not read as either party drafted them. “Contingent” describes the third structural remedy the government sought, a divestiture of the remaining ad server if competition had not returned, and it was rejected along with the other two.

Both deadlines run from the date of the order. Counting from September 2, the redaction deadline falls around September 16 and the joint final judgment around October 2, 2026. The court’s own counting rules govern the exact days, so treat both as approximate until a filing confirms them.

The second clock is the one publishers should watch. Until the joint proposed final judgment is filed, and until the court enters a final judgment after it, there is no operative obligation on Google. The redacted opinion will explain the court’s reasoning and name the remedies it accepted; the final judgment will turn them into enforceable terms with dates and a monitoring arrangement, if any.

The order accepts most of what the parties proposed. The proposals are public; the selection is not. The table lists what each side put before the court, as recorded in trade coverage of the November 2025 filings, and it is a menu, not a verdict. Any item here may have been accepted, modified or dropped.

Where the two sides overlapped, the odds that a provision survived are obviously better, and the day’s reporting treated the shared items as the likely core. That is a reasonable inference and it remains an inference. The order’s word “modified” applies to the accepted remedies, so even a provision both sides proposed may not read as either drafted it. The duration and monitoring row is the one with the widest gap between the parties and the least public signal.

The background is settled and short. The Department of Justice and a group of states filed the case in January 2023. On April 17, 2025 the court found that Google had unlawfully monopolised the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising and unlawfully tied the two, under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. The remedies trial ran from late September 2025, with closing arguments on November 21, 2025. The September 2 order is the result of that phase.

From the order alone, the following cannot be stated: any obligation Google now has; when any obligation begins; how long it lasts; whether a trustee or monitor is appointed and with what access; which of the parties’ proposals were dropped; and why the court rejected divestiture. Coverage on the day reported reasons and mechanisms with confidence. Some of that will prove right when the opinion unseals. None of it can be checked today.

Clock one has run. On September 16, 2026 the parties filed a joint notice stating that none of them believed any redactions were necessary and that they were unaware of any protected third-party material in the opinion (Document 1859). The same day the court ordered the sealed memorandum opinion of September 2, 2026 unsealed in full (Document 1860). The opinion is Document 1858, 106 pages, and it is now on the public docket. We read it there. Four of the questions section 04 listed as unanswerable are answered; the rest still wait on the final judgment.

How long it lasts: six years. The parties were far apart — the plaintiffs asked for fifteen years with a possible extension, Google for six. The court took Google’s number, on the reasoning that a six-year term accounts for the roughly one year it expects the monitor and technical committee to take to stand up, gives rivals ramp-up time, and leaves room to revisit the judgment “in light of changing market realities”. A footnote preserves the court’s authority to extend the term if the final judgment has not been fully satisfied within the six years. The court described the plaintiffs’ fifteen-year proposal as risking “impairing rather than enhancing competition” in an industry it compared to shoeing a galloping horse, and noted that because only behavioural remedies were imposed, implementation should be complete within fifteen months.

Where it applies: worldwide. Google argued international comity should confine any injunction to the United States. The court refused. It had already found the relevant geographic market for both the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets to be worldwide, and held that an injunction aimed at restoring competition “must reach worldwide, or else risk adverse effects within the United States”. It added a practical reason: Google already runs its ad tech on a global basis, charging consistent exchange fees and rolling product and policy changes out worldwide, so a global judgment means consistent product changes rather than a patchwork. The final judgment “will apply beyond the United States and reach globally”.

When it begins: sixty days after entry, following the approach taken in the Google Search remedies decision — except for the obligation to begin appointing the monitor and forming the technical committee, which is effective immediately. So there are now three clocks, not two: the joint filing around October 2, entry of the final judgment, and a sixty-day runway after that before most obligations bite.

And a monitor is appointed. The opinion refers to a monitor serving from appointment until the final judgment expires, alongside a technical committee — which settles the question section 04 raised about whether anyone would be watching, though the scope of that monitor’s access is a matter for the final judgment text.

What has not changed is the holding this post was written about. Structural relief stays rejected: divestiture of AdX, open-sourcing DFP's final auction logic and the contingent divestiture of DFP Remainder are all refused, and most of the parties' proposed behavioural remedies, as modified by the court, are accepted. A six-year worldwide conduct decree is what Google got instead of selling the exchange. Trade coverage on September 17 reported the six-year worldwide terms; the figures above are read from the court's own opinion rather than from that coverage.

For a publisher or an advertiser, the practical position is that the market keeps its structure and gains rules that are not yet written. The size of that market is in our programmatic advertising statistics and display advertising benchmarks. The routes below follow from the order and its two dates.

The wider picture for anyone who buys or sells programmatic display is in our analysis of the agentic ad tech buying layer, which was written against the integrated Google stack the order leaves in place. Teams that want their reporting and buying decisions built on documents rather than headlines can start with our paid media practice.