Google Search Remedies
After years of legal proceedings, the Google antitrust case has finally resulted in a ruling with real-world impact—though perhaps not in the way many expected. Rather than forcing dramatic changes, the ruling preserves key aspects of how users currently engage with Google’s products.
Lauren Feiner (PDF, MacRumors, Slashdot):
Google will not have to sell its Chrome browser in order to address its illegal monopoly in online search, DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Tuesday. Over a year ago, Judge Mehta found that the search giant had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act; his ruling now determines what Google must do in response.
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In his 230-page ruling, Mehta explained that even though Google’s default status as the search engine on Chrome “undoubtedly contributes to Google’s dominance in general search,” forcing Google to sell it is ultimately “a poor fit for this case.” The DOJ failed to prove that solutions less extreme than a break-up would not be enough to restore competition, he wrote. Furthermore, he says, the DOJ did not prove a causal connection between its monopoly power and Chrome defaults.
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Declining to ban Google from paying for defaults actually “heightened” the need to adopt a remedy that forces Google to share some of its search data with competitors, Mehta noted. “Qualified Competitors will have to continue to compete with Google on price to gain distribution. So, their competitive advantage will have to come from innovation and differentiating their search services from Google’s,” he wrote. To do that, search competitors need scale that they have largely been denied by Google’s search monopoly. So Mehta agreed to let qualified competitors buy at marginal cost a one-time snapshot of a variety of search data that Google collects, which he says will let those rivals “identify and crawl more web pages with valuable content and do so more efficiently.”
Google will be able to keep making search deals like its $20 billion agreement to be the default option in Apple’s Safari browser, a federal district court judge ruled in the US v. Google antitrust case on Tuesday. Executives from both Apple and Firefox developer Mozilla have defended their search deals with Google, with Mozilla’s CFO testifying that Firefox might be doomed without the deal in place.
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Google also won’t have to show choice screens on its products, according to the ruling.
This ruling marks the most significant monopoly case since the Microsoft trial nearly 30 years ago.
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Google’s search advertising business, which generated over $198 billion last year, remains under pressure from ongoing antitrust scrutiny even as AI-driven search alternatives, such as Perplexity, grow.
In the meantime, the market is overjoyed at what it sees as a Google win. Google stock jumped 8% as the news quickly spread. Nevertheless, Google is widely expected to appeal the decision, and the judge’s orders will be paused pending appeal. This process will take years.
Today, the decade-long campaign to stop big tech from dominating our society took a significant step backwards, as the judge hearing the search case against Google, Amit Mehta, chose not to meaningfully constrain the firm’s illegal behavior. And to engage in such deferential behavior, he openly ignored Supreme Court precedent.
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Mehta found that Google was doing illegal things to maintain its monopoly, but he didn’t force the company to stop doing those illegal things.
Why not? Well, he said that new companies like OpenAI had emerged to potentially challenge Google, and he didn’t want to, and I’m not kidding, hinder Google’s ability to compete with them.
[…]
This remedy, by contrast, is obviously going to fail. And the main reason is that, unlike Microsoft, Google’s leadership is utterly unchastened. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and chief legal officer Kent Walker will get bonuses for what they did. They see this conflict as one in which they fought bitterly, and kept at it, and shredded documents, and the result was… victory.
Previously:
- DOJ Wins Google Ads Antitrust Case
- Firefox Benefits From Browser Choice Screens
- Mozilla Also Defends Google Revenue Sharing Agreement
- Apple to Defend Google Revenue Sharing Agreement
- DOJ Wants Google to Sell Chrome and De-Google Android
- Google Search and Ads Monopoly
- DOJ Investigating Apple-Google Default Search Engine Deal
- Cue Testimony in US v. Google
- Lawsuit Alleges Google Paid Apple to Stay Out of Search
Update (2025-09-04): Vlad Prelovac:
[Judge Mehta] showed very deep understanding of the matter and didn’t fall for meaningless remedies such as breaking up Google, or divesting Chrome but went for search index access, just as we recommended.
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The mandatory license will be for five years, not the ten years plaintiffs requested. The court views this as a temporary measure to help competitors become independent, not a permanent reliance on Google.
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In the first year, competitors can only use Google’s syndicated results for a maximum of 40% of their total annual queries. This cap is intended to ensure competitors develop their own capability for the majority of searches and rely on Google only for the most difficult “long-tail” queries.
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Google will be allowed to place “ordinary commercial restrictions” on how competitors use the syndicated search results. This means competitors will be prohibited from activities like scraping, crawling, or indexing the results to protect Google’s intellectual property.
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The court explicitly rejects the plaintiffs’ proposal to force Google to offer syndication at its marginal cost.
So Google can still pay Apple and Mozilla, just not exclusively? That seems like a distinction that might not make much practical difference. If Google can outbid everyone else (which they can), and Apple/Mozilla have admitted users get pissed when they don’t use Google as default, what exactly changes here?
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Mehta isn’t requiring Google to hand over everything—which would raise legitimate privacy and security concerns—but specifically the datasets that flow from the scale advantages Google gained through its anticompetitive conduct. It’s an elegant solution that addresses the actual harm without creating new ones.
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When the DOJ first filed this lawsuit, Google’s search dominance seemed unshakeable. By the time Mehta was crafting remedies, generative AI had created the first credible alternative to traditional search in decades. Suddenly, preventing Google from extending its search monopoly into AI distribution became just as important as addressing its existing dominance.
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The question remains whether any of this will actually create more competitive search engines. But at least it’s not actively making things worse, which, honestly, was my biggest fear going in. I had feared that the court wouldn’t properly thread the needle on remedies, and yet… this seems to have been done very thoughtfully and strikes what is likely a good balance.
Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google’s wicked deeds could emerge. That meant that the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is “remedy”) for Google.
Yesterday, he handed down that remedy and it is as bad as it could be. In fact, it is likely the worst possible remedy for this case[…]
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This will not secure competition for search, but it will certainly democratize human rights violations at scale.
Doubtless there will be loopholes in this data-sharing order. Google will have the right to hold back some of its data (that is, our data) if it is deemed “sensitive.” This isn’t so much a loophole as is a loopchasm.
Today, the decade-long campaign to stop big tech from dominating our society took a significant step backwards, as the judge hearing the search case against Google, Amit Mehta, chose not to meaningfully constrain the firm’s illegal behavior. And to engage in such deferential behavior, he openly ignored Supreme Court precedent.
[…]
Mehta found that Google was doing illegal things to maintain its monopoly, but he didn’t force the company to stop doing those illegal things.
Why not? Well, he said that new companies like OpenAI had emerged to potentially challenge Google, and he didn’t want to, and I’m not kidding, hinder Google’s ability to compete with them.
[…]
This remedy, by contrast, is obviously going to fail. And the main reason is that, unlike Microsoft, Google’s leadership is utterly unchastened. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and chief legal officer Kent Walker will get bonuses for what they did. They see this conflict as one in which they fought bitterly, and kept at it, and shredded documents, and the result was… victory.
Confusing part is: The opinion says G “cannot secure exclusivity for its GenAI products…” yet allows Google “to pay distributors for default placement.” But the judge himself found that defaults end up mimicking exclusives!
What if Google now offers Samsung billions to preinstall Gemini as its operating AI -- yet in a way that technically can be switched? Is that a banned exclusive, or is that paying for default placement?
Previously:
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So just a slap of the wrist.
What would have been more meaningful is if Judge Mehta had found that Google uses open source in a way that aggregates benefits to the company while socialising costs and ordered a reversal of that. Have Alphabet set up trusts worth billions of dollars for Chromium, Android, etc and have them administered by known leaders of the open source community.
