Compliance
The judge rejected the AdX sale. The supply path woke up unchanged
On 2 September 2026 Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the three structural remedies sought by the Department of Justice, among them the sale of AdX and opening the final auction logic of the ad server. The court accepted most of the behavioural remedies, with modifications, and ordered both parties to draft a joint final judgment within 30 days.
The part that decides the practical effect is missing: the opinion was sealed for 14 days, so the specific behavioural obligations were not public when this note was written. Without that text nobody can say what changes in the price a publisher receives, and any figure claiming otherwise today would be a guess.
What can already be stated is what did not change. Ad Manager remains an integrated product, AdX and the ad server remain under the same owner, and the route Google's demand takes to your page is the one it took before the ruling. Anyone expecting the judgment to open new space in the auction will have to keep opening that space themselves.
Our reading did not change with the ruling, and that is the point: Google's demand is fought for inside the publisher's own Ad Manager, by whoever already runs it. What we bring are formats that create space where there was none, and demand that does not depend on that auction. The judgment made the separation sharper, not blurrier.
Sources and reading
AdExchanger: Google Won't Have To Break Up Its Ad Tech Business