The biggest takeaways from the Google search remedies ruling

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that Google must share some search results with “qualified competitors,” but does not have to sell its Chrome browser.

The decision came over a year after Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google illegally maintained a monopoly over search general services and general search text advertising.

Judge Mehta’s 226-page ruling this week capped off a half-decade long ordeal, though Google said it would appeal. The U.S. Department of Justice sued Google in 2020, alleging it impeded competition by partnering with device makers and web browsers to position its search engine as the default.

Google now must share “certain search index and user-interaction data,” but not advertising data. Mehta wrote that the decision “will deny Google the fruits of its exclusionary acts and promote competition. The court, however, has narrowed the datasets Google will be required to share to tailor the remedy to its anticompetitive conduct.”

“Google shall offer Qualified Competitors search and search text ads syndication services to enable those firms to deliver high-quality search results and ads to compete with Google while they develop their own search technologies and capacity,” Mehta wrote.

‘A slap on the wrist’

Some industry experts The Current spoke with were underwhelmed by the ruling.

“This is a slap on the wrist, which does not require divestiture of Chrome or Android,” says Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer at Ad Fontes Media.

Alan Chapell, an attorney specializing in advertising and media, says that he views the ruling as an admission that “existing antitrust laws are insufficient to meaningfully address the competition problems created by Google.”

Sara Owens, SVP of analytics and data science at Ars X Machina, says the ruling is “very disappointing.”

“Very little was done to reduce Google’s power, so the monopoly will continue,” she predicts.

Ari Paparo, author of the book Yield that describes Google’s ad tech business, says that the data-sharing remedy “seems extremely unlikely to blunt Google’s market share.”

DOJ ‘overreached’ in seeking a Chrome sale

The DOJ had proposed earlier this year that Google be forced to sell Chrome, and also called for Judge Mehta to prohibit the exclusive contracts with device makers and web browsers.

Judge Mehta did bar the company “from entering or maintaining any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app.” But he also ruled that Google can still make payments to distribution partners to pre-load those products.

Regarding the selling of Chrome, Judge Mehta wrote that the DOJ “overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.”

Further, Judge Mehta ruled that Google is not required “to share granular, query-level data with advertisers or provide them with more access to such data.”

But the company is “compelled to publicly disclose changes it makes to ad auctions “to promote greater transparency in search text ads pricing and to prevent Google from increasing prices by secretly fine-tuning its ad auctions.”

AI ‘changed the course of this case’

Beyond the remedies, Judge Mehta focused extensively in the ruling on the role AI could have on the search ecosystem, noting that the “emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case.”

“No witness at the liability trial testified that GenAI products posed a near-term threat to GSEs,” Judge Mehta wrote. “The very first witness at the remedies hearing, by contrast, placed GenAI front and center as a nascent competitive threat.”

Judge Mehta wrote that, long term, generative AI companies are “striving to transform chatbots into a kind of ‘super assistant,’” and that search is a “necessary component of this product vision.”

“One frequent criticism of antitrust is that it fights the last battles; in this case the judge was cognizant of the coming battle [regarding AI] and chose to take a very light hand on the remedies within that context,” Paparo says.