Google appeals judge’s decision on search monopoly

Google is appealing a federal court’s ruling that it is an illegal online search monopoly. The company filed a notice of appeal Friday, seeking a pause in court-ordered remedies intended to restore competition to the online search market.

“As we have long said, the Court’s August 2024 decision ignored the reality that people use Google because they want to, not because they have to,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a blog post. “The decision failed to take into account the rapid pace of innovation and intense competition we face from established players and well-funded start-ups. And it ignored compelling testimony from browser makers like Apple and Mozilla, who said they chose to feature Google because it delivers the highest quality search experience to their consumers.”

Google is demanding that solutions that would force it to share search data and syndicate services with competitors be suspended, arguing that the measures would “endanger Americans’ privacy and discourage competitors from creating their own products – ultimately stifling the innovation that keeps the United States at the forefront of global technology.” A pause would further delay any action required by Google in a lawsuit first filed by the Justice Department in October 2020. The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Washington-based federal judge Amit Mehta ruled in 2024 that Google maintains an illegal monopoly on “general search services” and “general search text advertising.” Mehta found that Google had anticompetitively deprived rivals of fair competition by entering into exclusionary contracts with phone and browser makers to make its search products the default. The result was an enduring monopoly whose “partners concluded it was financially impossible to change” its default search provider for fear of sacrificing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in revenue share paid by Google, Mehta wrote. “These are Fortune 500 companies, and they have nowhere to turn other than Google.”

But Mehta ultimately didn’t go as far as the DOJ hoped in his relief ruling, refusing to break up the company by demanding the sale of its Chrome browser, which the government said was a key distribution point for search services. Instead, he ordered the company to share research information with competitors that could help them gain a foothold in the market, with the aim of restoring competition in the area of ​​search services.

Google had to wait until Mehta issued his ruling in September before appealing the underlying monopoly finding. The case could ultimately drag on for at least a few more years, especially if it goes all the way to the Supreme Court.