More than a year after ruling that Google knowingly maintained a monopoly in search, the court released their remedies to counteract this monopoly. A lot has happened in that year, and the 230-page final ruling reflects the impact of GenAI and other market-shaking forces. This nearly 5-year case has seismic implications for the search industry. I am not a lawyer, but I have followed this case closely as a search industry expert. On balance, Google won more battles than they lost, but the penalties were substantial, and the outcome of this case will reshape the search industry and competitive landscape over the next five years.

In August of 2024, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” The case began almost five years ago, when the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and 11 states filed an antitrust complaint against Google under the Sherman Act. Two months later, 38 additional states and territories filed suit, and the cases were consolidated. The antitrust ruling found that Google’s exclusivity agreements and control of both the search and search advertising ecosystems stifled competition and allowed Google to collect valuable data that perpetuated their monopoly.

Not surprisingly, the DOJ and Google strongly disagreed about the proposed remedies (that’s legalese for “penalties”). These are the highlights of what Google has to give up:

Google is barred from exclusive contracts

In the court’s own words, “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 is the most direct result of the 2024 ruling and keeps Google from using their contracts to close the market to competitors.

Google will have to give up search data

Qualified Competitors will have access to certain search index and user-interaction data, on a one-time basis and at marginal cost. This data includes (some details TBD):

1. Unique DocID for each document in the index
2. A DocID to URL/page map
3. The first-seen and last-crawled time for each URL
4. Spam score (presumably, by URL, but unclear)
5. “Quality measures including authoritativeness”
6. User signals, including “popularity” and device-type flag

This Google search data dump may be meaningless to the general public, but we search marketers know how significant it is. Google pushed back strongly on this remedy and was able to limit the data sharing to a one-time snapshot and remove key data points.

The court also ruled that Google will be required to share data from the Glue and RankEmbed systems with Qualified Competitors, up to twice per competitor. Details are unclear, as this data involves a number of proprietary systems. Google objected that such data could help competitors reverse-engineer the algorithm, but the court determined that this was unlikely.

Google must provide syndicated data

Under the ruling, any Qualified Competitor will have access to syndicated search data, including organic results, Local results, Maps, Video, Images, and Knowledge Panel features. This data must be on par with current search syndication agreements. To prevent competitors from simply creating a white-labeled search engine, Google will be allowed to charge competitive, market rates for syndicated data.

While the DOJ declared victory, Google successfully fought back against many of the more severe remedies. The following are some of the key concessions Google won:

Google does not have to divest Chrome or Android

While the court considered Chrome divestiture to be a viable structural remedy, they determined that Chrome was too dependent on Google's infrastructure and products to be reasonably divested. In other words, Chrome can’t exist without Google. The court also determined that Chrome divestiture was beyond the scope of this judgment, as Chrome is an international product, and remedies in this case were limited to the US Similarly, the court ruled against a contingent Android divestiture (after 5 years) proposed by DOJ.

Google may accept payment for default placement

The DOJ proposed payment bans for default placement and other benefits (i.e., Google paying vendors for premium placement). The court determined that payment bans would potentially harm the entire ecosystem, including OEMs, carriers, and browser developers. The court also speculated that payment bans might actually help Google short term, as providers could end up still using Google products and services without getting paid. In other words, payment bans could end up rewarding Google for being a monopoly.

Google does not have to share full Knowledge Graph data

The court determined that Google does not have to share data that would allow competitors to recreate the Knowledge Graph. In essence, this penalty did not fit the crime, as Google built the Knowledge Graph “from over [redacted #] data feeds and pipelines, including from third parties,” and not from its user-data advantages.

Google does not have to allow training data opt-out

The DOJ had pushed for allowing publishers to selectively opt out of allowing their data to be used for training machine-learning models. The court determined that this remedy was poorly argued by the plaintiffs and rested too heavily on statements from direct competitors in the GenAI space (including OpenAI).

Google will not reinstate Exact Match in Google Ads

While my analysis has been focused more on the organic search side, this was a major sticking point for paid search. Essentially, the court determined that the impact of reinstating Exact Match was too hard to measure a decade after the changes were made, and it was unclear how this remedy fit the current state of affairs.

First, none of the Google antitrust remedies will kick in immediately. The court will establish a Technical Committee for implementation and enforcement, lasting for a period of 6 years. Realistically, the court believes it will take up to a year to establish this committee.

Second, while the definition of “Qualified Competitor” in the ruling is to be determined by the committee, it’s doubtful that any SEO tool provider or agency will make that list. It’s also certain that Google will push for harsh penalties on sharing this data, and we’re probably not going to get any major leaks of the search index or user data.

The impact of removing exclusivity will take time — as the court wisely observed, the power of being the default search engine is formidable. However, over time, the removal of exclusivity and the data-sharing should open up competition. Opening up syndicated data may also give us third-party search engines that compete on unique features, give consumers and marketers more choice, and indirectly reveal aspects of how Google search works.

The antitrust trial did raise the curtain on some of Google’s inner workings, and the final ruling contains a few interesting revelations. These are direct quotes:

• “Google receives nine times more queries each day than its rivals combined, and 19 times more on mobile. The volume of click-and-query data that Google acquires in 13 months would take Microsoft 17.5 years.”
• “As of 2020, nearly 90% of all U.S.-based queries are entered through search access points that flow to Google. Google’s share is even higher (95%) on mobile devices.”
• “Google’s Knowledge Graph … database is enormous. It contains five billion entities and 500 billion connections among them.”

Google is highly motivated to avoid future antitrust trials, not only because of the possible penalties, but because of what testimony might reveal about how Google search works.

It’s worth repeating — I am not a lawyer. Personally, I believe that Judge Mehta and his team were technically competent, conscientious, and even courageous at times. Google also wisely pulled back on exclusivity clauses post-verdict, which gave the appearance of compliance.

I am old enough to remember both the Microsoft and AT&T (“Ma Bell”) antitrust suits, and I am sympathetic to the difficulties of predicting how any remedy might impact the industry or even the overall U.S. economy. It’s also, as the court noted, very difficult to determine how much of Google’s market dominance was fairly won with investment and innovation.

The court was particularly swayed by the massive disruption in search that GenAI/LLMs pose, potentially opening up new competition. Specifically, they noted that GenAI has attracted a surge of investment in search, stating that: “The money flowing into this space, and how quickly it has arrived, is astonishing.” I don’t think many of us would argue with that point.

Here’s where I disagree. I strongly believe that the court missed its own point regarding Google’s monopolistic advantages. While competitors like OpenAI have certainly disrupted the search market and are aggressively pursuing search-like capabilities, Google’s infrastructure, index, and user data remain massive advantages. Google still maintains an enviable pool of machine learning and AI talent, and has pioneered key innovations in the space, including groundbreaking work in transformers and self-attention that drove the GenAI revolution. GenAI competitors have massive hurdles to overcome in the search market, and I believe that Judge Mehta’s ruling may have suffered, like most of the industry, from AI hype.

Ultimately, we can’t expect the industry landscape to be rewritten by a single ruling, even at the end of a 5-year case of this magnitude. These remedies are serious, and I suspect Google will think twice about pushing too close to the line of another antitrust action. Even by internet-industry standards, the next 2–3 years in search and GenAI seem impossible to predict, but I believe this ruling will become a noticeable weight on the shifting balance.