from the surprisingly-reasonable,-but-still-messy dept
Last summer, when Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had violated antitrust laws through its search distribution agreements, I was left wondering what the hell any reasonable remedy would look like. The case always struck me as weird—Google was paying billions to Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine because users actually wanted Google as the default. Any remedy seemed likely to either do nothing useful or actively harm the very competitors it was supposed to help.
Well, Mehta just dropped his remedial ruling, and honestly? It’s more reasonable than I expected, though still messy in predictable ways.
The Big Picture: No Chrome Breakup Or Android Sell Off, But Real Constraints
The DOJ had pushed for some truly bonkers structural remedies, including forcing Google to sell off Chrome or Android. Mehta wasn’t having it:
Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment. Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.
This makes sense. As discussed before, under antitrust law, structural breakups should relate to the actual violation. The problem wasn’t Chrome or Android—it was the exclusive deals that locked up search distribution. Breaking up unrelated business units would be pure punishment without purpose and could (again) do more damage to competitors than to Google itself.
The Exclusive Deals Ban: Logical But Concerning
The core remedy targets the actual problem—Google’s exclusive distribution agreements:
Google will be barred from entering or maintaining any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app.
This tracks the violation, which is good. But here’s where it gets tricky. The ruling also says:
Google will not be barred from making payments or offering other consideration to distribution partners for preloading or placement of Google Search, Chrome, or its GenAI products.
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?
The court was clearly aware of this problem. In fact, Mehta’s analysis of the downstream effects reads like a catalog of unintended consequences that would make any antitrust reformer wince:
The complete loss or reduction of payments to distributors is likely to have significant downstream effects on multiple fronts, some possibly dire. They could include:
- Lost competition and innovation from small developers in the browser market. … (stating that for Opera the loss of payments from Google “would make it hard for [it] to continue to invest in innovative solutions that [it] provide[s] for the US audience”). Mozilla, in particular, fears that lower revenue share payments could “potentially start a downward spiral of usage as people defected from our browser, which . . . could at the end of the day put Firefox out of business.” … (“Mozilla has repeatedly made clear that without these [revenue share] payments, it would not be able to function as it does today.”).
- Fewer products and less product innovation from Apple. … (Cue) (stating that the loss of revenue share would “impact [Apple’s] ability at creating new products and new capabilities into the [operating system] itself”). The loss of revenue share “just lets [Apple] do less.”…
- Less investment in the U.S. market by Android OEMs, which would reduce competition in the U.S. mobile phone market with Apple. …(“[I]f [Samsung is] not getting paid from Google in the revenue share that [it’s] currently getting, I think it will probably make [Samsung’s] position much weaker to innovate and provide . . . the latest technology and better services to our customer. . . . [W]e might face . . . a very difficult situation to continue our business.”); … (“If [Motorola] were not to receive [revenue share payments], it would have significant financial burdens on [its] business. . . . [A]dvanced resources in North America . . . would be put at risk if [it] were to lose this funding.”); … (“It is much more costly for [Verizon] to promote an [Apple] device than an Android device . . . . So the more the Android ecosystem loses share in the Verizon customer base, the more costly it is for Verizon, and that weighs on our [profit and loss].”).
- Higher mobile phone prices and less innovative phone features. … (“[S]ome of [Samsung] product[s] could end up increasing prices or defeature our product[s] to manage the profit, which will make our position very weaker in the market and especially in U.S.”); … (“[O]ne of the ways [AT&T] can help offset some of the cost of th[e] device subsidy and make the devices more affordable to consumers is to have the ability to seek distribution or revenue share agreements with search, but also other services.”); … (“[T]hose restrictions would prevent Google from entering into agreements similar to what [T-Mobile] ha[s] with the Android Activation Agreement, . . . the revenues from which [it] use[s] to help prop up the Android ecosystem through subsidies . . . et cetera.”); … (stating that Verizon’s RSA with Google “help[s] and fund[s] the promotion of devices and offset[s]” billions in subsidies).
The court cannot predict to any degree of certainty that one or more of these effects will in fact occur. But the risk is far from small, which is reason enough not to proceed with the remedy.
Think about the weird logic here: Google’s current payment structure has created an ecosystem where cutting off those payments would likely kill Firefox (a key browser competitor), leave Samsung and other Android manufacturers financially weakened against Apple, and potentially raise phone prices for consumers. Meanwhile, Google would save billions in payments and still likely retain most users anyway.
In such a scenario, keeping the money flowing is actually essential to greater competition.
Data Sharing: The Actually Interesting Bit
But here’s where Mehta may have found the real lever for change. Google will have to share search index and user interaction data with “Qualified Competitors”:
Google will have to make available to Qualified Competitors certain search index and user-interaction data, though not ads data, as such sharing will deny Google the fruits of its exclusionary acts and promote competition.
This could be genuinely transformative, but there are lots of questions about how it will actually work in practice. The biggest barrier to competing with Google isn’t just the exclusive deals—it’s the chicken-and-egg problem of needing massive scale to build a decent search index, but needing a decent search index to attract users that create scale. Google’s search index represents decades of crawling, indexing, and learning from user interactions across billions of queries. No startup can replicate that from scratch.
As DuckDuckGo noted in their remedies proposal, access to Google’s search results via API could actually level the playing field in ways that breaking up Chrome or Android never could (though DuckDuckGo has said that this remedy ruling is insufficient in its eyes). A competitor could potentially build a differentiated search experience—better privacy, different ranking algorithms, specialized vertical search—while leveraging Google’s underlying index as a foundation.
The court was careful to limit this:
The court, however, has narrowed the datasets Google will be required to share to tailor the remedy to its anticompetitive conduct.
The key word here is “narrowed.” 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.
Google will also have to offer search and ads syndication services to qualified competitors:
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. Such syndication, however, shall occur largely on ordinary commercial terms that are consistent with Google’s current syndication services.
Think of this as mandated training wheels for search competitors. Google has to help rivals build their own search capacity using Google’s infrastructure, but only until they can develop their own. The “ordinary commercial terms” language is crucial—it prevents Google from pricing competitors out while ensuring the remedy doesn’t become a permanent subsidy.
The AI Wrinkle
What’s fascinating is how much generative AI looms over this entire ruling. As Mehta notes (GSEs is “general search engines”):
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. The very first witness at the remedies hearing, by contrast, placed GenAI front and center as a nascent competitive threat. These remedies proceedings thus have been as much about promoting competition among GSEs as ensuring that Google’s dominance in search does not carry over into the GenAI space. Many of Plaintiffs’ proposed remedies are crafted with that latter objective in mind.
This timing accident may have saved the case from irrelevance. 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.
Dozens of pages are devoted to the rise of LLM technology, as well as chatbots and agents. While it notes the limits of comparing Generative AI tech to search, it also notes how competitive the market is:
The GenAI space is highly competitive. See id. at 503:25–504:4 (Turley) (Q. And let’s talk about the [GenAI] space . . . . You consider that space to be very competitive; correct? A. Yes, absolutely.”); id. at 3335:19-23 (Collins) (“[Q.] How would you describe the current level of competition with respect to foundation models as compared to the course of competition over the years that you’ve seen? A. [It] is the most competitive market I’ve ever worked in.”); id. at 685:4-8 (Hsiao) (“Q. How would you describe the competitive space that the Gemini app occupies? A. I would say I don’t think I’ve seen a more fierce competition ever in my 20-some years of working in technology.”).
There have been numerous new market entrants. See id. at 685:9-13 (Hsiao) (“It’s explosive growth. There’s new entrants. . . . You know, Grok, DeepSeek, all sort of new emerging models that are really, really strong.” …. (Hitt) (“You see entrants like Grok or DeepSeek, that may not have existed six months ago, are now able to reach the level of performance to wind up in the top ten of these models.”); id. at 2459:21-23 (Pichai) (“You have seen over the last few months as many people have launched chatbots. Very quickly, these chatbots reach tens of millions of users.”).
Again, the ruling makes it clear that Generative AI tools and search aren’t exactly direct competitors yet, but there are signs of the market heading that way:
GenAI products may be having some impact on GSE usage. … (Cue) (testifying that the volume of Google Search queries in Apple’s Safari web browser declined for the first time in 22 years perhaps due to the emergence of GenAI chatbots). But GenAI products have not eliminated the need for GSEs. … (“ChatGPT already expanded what is possible for parts of Search, but users don’t yet use ChatGPT for the full range of Search needs.”); … (Hsiao) (testifying that Google tracks so-called “cannibalization” of Google Search by GenAI chatbots and the Gemini app is not diverting queries from Google Search to a significant degree today); … (Cue) (attributing the recent decline in Safari’s search volume to increasing usage of GenAI apps but recognizing these apps must improve to compete with Google Search); … (Opening Arg.) (Plaintiffs’ counsel acknowledging that general search and GenAI “are different but overlapping products” and that GenAI “is not a replacement for [s]earch today);
Again, it seems like Judge Mehta is properly trying to respond to the actual violations here and trying to make sure any remedies match that, without getting in the way of actual market forces at work.
Some Judicial Humility Is Nice To See
Throughout the ruling, Mehta acknowledges the fundamental challenge of antitrust remedies:
Notwithstanding this power, courts must approach the task of crafting remedies with a healthy dose of humility. This court has done so. It has no expertise in the business of GSEs, the buying and selling of search text ads, or the engineering of GenAI technologies. And, unlike the typical case where the court’s job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts, here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future. Not exactly a judge’s forte.
This is refreshingly honest. Courts suck at designing technology markets. The best they can do is try to remove barriers and let competition happen, rather than micromanage outcomes.
Still A Long Road Ahead
Of course, none of this matters immediately. Google will likely appeal (though, honestly, the result here might be worth not having to spend on an appeal and the uncertainty it would bring), and we’re looking at years more litigation before anything actually happens. By then, the entire search landscape might have been transformed by AI anyway.
But if this ruling does eventually stick, it’s not the disaster I feared it might be. It targets the actual problem (exclusive distribution deals), creates some potentially useful competitive tools (data sharing and syndication with proper limitations for privacy reasons), and avoids the worst structural remedies that would have helped no one.
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.
Filed Under: amit mehta, android, antitrust, chrome, competition, doj, remedies
Companies: apple, google, mozilla
