The ruling acknowledges that Chrome’s market position does contribute to Google’s search dominance, but full divestiture can often have unintended consequences. Mehta decided that Google’s use of Chrome as a vehicle for search is not sufficiently linked to anticompetitive conduct to justify forcing a sale. “Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture (sic) of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints,” the ruling reads.
This is undeniably a big win for Google. The company has issued a statement that reads as cautiously optimistic. “Today’s decision recognizes how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information,” writes Google’s Lee-Anne Mulholland. “This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want. That’s why we disagree so strongly with the Court’s initial decision in August 2024 on liability.”
Data remedies have some teeth
While Google has escaped a breakup, the court does intend to impose some behavioral and data remedies. The DOJ isn’t getting everything it asked for here, but some of these changes could give Google’s competitors a boost.
Under the court’s ruling, Google will still be permitted to pay for search placement—those multi-billion-dollar arrangements with Apple and Mozilla can continue. However, Google cannot require any of its partners to distribute Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini. That means Google cannot, for example, make access to the Play Store contingent on bundling its other apps on phones.
DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg has criticized these restrictions as insufficient to address Google’s monopoly. “We do not believe the remedies ordered by the court will force the changes necessary to adequately address Google’s illegal behavior,” says Weinberg. “Google will still be allowed to continue to use its monopoly to hold back competitors, including in AI search. As a result, consumers will continue to suffer. We believe Congress should now step in to swiftly make Google do the thing it fears the most: compete on a level playing field.”
Part of the reason the DOJ sought to rope in Chrome was that it gives Google a seemingly insurmountable lead in user and search data, which is essential for building a competing product. Witnesses in the case explained that competing search products suffer from the “80-20 problem.” It’s relatively easy to build a search product that can answer 80 percent of queries, but that last 20 percent is tough. These “long tail” searches are where Google’s scale helps it stay ahead of others.
The government asked for mandatory data sharing to help other companies make progress on that last 20 percent. Mehta agrees that making Google share some search data can address its anticompetitive conduct, but again, he narrowed the scope. Google will have to share user interaction data from its GLUE and RankEmbed models with “qualified competitors” at least twice. However, it won’t have to share generative AI model training data or provide ongoing access to the allowed data sets.
Google’s search index will also be opened up to competitors, but not with the terms the DOJ wanted. The index data will include elements like document IDs, URL maps, crawl dates, spam analysis, and more. However, the court declined to make Google provide this data on an ongoing basis. Instead, competitors will be able to access this data once “at or around” the time they are recognized as a qualified competitor. This will give other search engines a boost as they work to catch up to Google.
The government wanted Google to provide access to its search results (i.e., syndication) for a “marginal cost,” the so-called search spin-off that CEO Sundar Pichai feared. But Mehta was persuaded that this could distort the market if handled incorrectly. Brave, which operates one of only two non-Google search indexes, objected to essentially forcing Google to undercut its business. The ruling agreed, noting that there is a market for search indexes. So, Google will have to offer its index at a price similar to others in the market.
This service will be available for five years instead of the ten years the DOJ wanted. Google will only have to provide organic results and can impose normal commercial usage restrictions, like prohibiting scraping or indexing of the results. In addition, the court has decided that companies syndicating Google‘s search results can only use Google’s results for 40 percent of their queries for the first year. That cap may go down over time, pushing companies to innovate rather than simply mirroring Google.
While DuckDuckGo isn’t happy with the more limited data sharing, Kagi founder Vladimir Prelovac is more optimistic. He praised the judge for ignoring the “meaningless remedies” like selling Chrome. He calls the move to open up Google’s index and search data “directionally correct.”
Google is naturally unhappy with this part of the ruling. “We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and we’re reviewing the decision closely,” said Google’s Lee-Anne Mulholland.
What comes next?
While this ruling is a pretty clear win for Google, it still technically lost the case. Google probably isn’t going to just accept the “monopolist” label, though. The company previously said it planned to appeal the case, and now it has that option.
The court’s remedies are supposed to be enforced by a technical committee, which will oversee the company’s operations for six years. The order says that the group must be set up within 60 days. However, Google will most likely ask to pause the order while it pursues an appeal. It did something similar with the Google Play case brought by Epic Games, but it just lost that appeal.
With the high likelihood of an appeal, it’s possible Google won’t have to make any changes for years—if ever. If the company chooses, it could take the case all the way to the US Supreme Court. If a higher court overturns the verdict, Google could go back to business as usual, avoiding even the narrow remedies chosen by Mehta.
