Judge Mehta of the District Court for the District of Columbia yesterday issued a long-awaited decision on remedies in the Google Search monopolization case. The 230-page opinion is both a nod to Google’s proposed remedies, but with modifications, and a reining in of overreach by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in proposing to restructure and quasi-regulate the online search market.
Regardless of where different stakeholders come out on Judge Mehta’s opinion, one thing is clear. The remedies adopted by the court tell us a lot about antitrust’s emerging role in the digital sector. The decision reinforces the importance of antitrust enforcement in promoting competition in digital markets. But it also conveys a strong message about its limitations and why the courts are ill-suited to engage in ongoing enforcement of regulatory-style remedies in a complex and dynamic sector.
To be clear, the decision places significant restrictions on Google moving forward. It prohibits entering into or maintaining exclusive contracts for the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app. It also requires Google to share narrow sets of search index and user-interaction data and provide search syndication services for search and search text ads to “qualified competitors.”
These conditions target the conduct that fostered Google’s dominance in online search, as the court established at the liability stage in 2024. At the same time, the conditions also help rivals achieve the scale necessary to compete, but for a much shorter time period than requested by the DOJ. In doing so, the goal of the opinion is clear: address the competitive harm, open the search market to competition, and apply pressure on rivals to innovate quickly.
The remedies proposed by the DOJ and rejected by the court are also revealing. For example, Google is not required to divest the Chrome browser or Android. The decision also allows payments to distributors for pre-loading or placement of Google search products; rejects a requirement for Google to share granular query-level data with advertisers; does not require mandatory choice screens; and declines to impose anti-retaliation, anti-circumvention, and self-preferencing conditions.
In whittling down the DOJ’s 20-plus proposed remedies covering bans on contracts, divestitures, and regulatory oversight of Google’s search platform, Judge Mehta’s decision exposes several important themes.
First, it is hard not to notice the court’s conclusion — repeated many times over — that many of the government’s proposals are not “tailored to fit” or “unrelated to” Google’s anticompetitive conduct in online search. This sends a clear message that plaintiffs should stick to proposed remedies that address specific antitrust violation(s) and avoid those that are designed to achieve broader public policy goals in a market.
Second, you cannot miss the court’s focus on the impact of the DOJ’s proposed remedies on consumers — something that the government largely overlooked — and that PPI emphasized in its April 2025 report Antitrust Remedies and U.S. v. Google: Putting the Consumer Back into the “Fix.” The opinion highlights the importance of the consumer welfare standard in stating that the court “…must be sensitive to remedies that risk substantially stifling technological innovation or impairing consumer welfare,” and “…if one or more of these adverse market impacts were to come to pass, it would harm consumer welfare.”
Indeed, consumer welfare features prominently in Judge Mehta’s reasoning behind rejecting the DOJ’s proposal to require divestiture of the Chrome browser. To wit, “…the court is highly skeptical that a Chrome divestiture would not come at the expense of substantial product degradation and a loss of consumer welfare.” In refocusing the antitrust lens on consumer welfare, the decision also identifies user privacy and data security as a prominent consumer welfare issue.
For example, the court bases “…the release of less than the full datasets…” on the need to promote user privacy. Similarly, the decision requires modifications to the makeup of the Technical Committee to “…address the important data privacy and data security issues arising from the Search Index and User-side Data remedies.” In digital markets, where the currency of exchange is user information, not dollars, product quality and user privacy are central to antitrust’s effects-based analysis under the prevailing consumer-welfare standard. The opinion amplifies the relevance of this fact.
Last but not least, the decision opens by framing a critical reality for antitrust enforcement in the digital sector. Namely, the pace of innovation — and especially GenAI technology — is having a transformative impact on online search. A remedy must, therefore, consider the implications. For example, Judge Mehta’s decision explains the need to modify DOJ’s data-sharing proposals “…to mitigate their impact on Google’s and competitors’ innovation incentives.” The court also shortened the duration of the DOJ remedy because the “…10-year term runs the risk of growing stale in these fast-moving times, where GenAI technologies are breaking barriers seemingly at light speed.”
While there are many takeaways from the Google search remedies decision, two are likely to have significant staying power. One is that the pace of innovation — juxtaposed with the relatively slow pace of antitrust litigation — poses ongoing challenges in the digital sector. A second is that the consumer welfare standard remains alive and well. As PPI noted in Antitrust Remedies and U.S. v. Google: Putting the Consumer Back into the “Fix,” “The District Court has the unique opportunity to ensure a strong remedy that restores competition while striking a better balance to protect consumers under the consumer welfare standard.” The opinion achieves this important goal.
