Google urges DC Circuit to overturn search monopoly remedies

WASHINGTON (CN) — Tech giant Google opened the latest chapter in its ongoing legal battle against the Justice Department over its dominance in internet search on Friday, urging the D.C. Circuit to overturn a federal judge’s illegal monopoly ruling and related data-sharing remedies to increase competition.

In a 111-page appeal brief, Google argued U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s “remarkable conclusion” wrongly punished the company for outperforming competitors and building a product so dominant its name became a verb, calling the ruling “as basic an error of antitrust law as a court can make.”

In August 2024, the Barack Obama appointee ruled Google illegally maintained a monopoly by paying billions to make its search engine the default on Safari and Mozilla browsers.

Mehta also found Google unlawfully tied Chrome and Google Play to agreements with device manufacturers, including Android and Samsung, to boost Google Search traffic and collect user data.

On Sept. 2, Mehta rejected the Justice Department’s request to force Google to divest Chrome and Android. Instead, he required the company to share its search index, user interaction data and certain search and text ad syndication services with competitors to help them match Google’s search quality.

“[Google] developed a superior search engine through hard work, bold innovation and shrewd business decisions,” the company said. “By 2009 — well before any conduct challenged here — Google handled 80% of U.S. users’ search queries, and was prescient in seeing first that ‘the future of search was on mobile [devices],’ leaving rivals scrambling ‘to catch up — unsuccessfully — ever since.”

When Apple and Mozilla decided to design their browsers with default search engines, they unsurprisingly chose Google Search after concluding Microsoft’s Bing was “inferior,” Google said.

Mehta’s determination that Google’s deals had harmed the competitive process was wrong, Google said.

“It did not impede its rivals’ opportunity to make — or Apple’s and Mozilla’s ability to choose — a better offer,” Google said. “Indeed, there is no finding — or even any evidence — that Google’s customers would have chosen a rival, even in the absence of the challenged agreements. Google just prevailed in the marketplace fair and square.”

The company argued the central question under Section 2 of the Sherman Act is whether Google engaged in “exclusionary conduct” that distorted or disabled competition, rather than conduct that merely helped preserve monopoly power.

Google said its agreements with Apple and Mozilla were “not exclusive deals at all” because both companies could distribute and promote competing search engines, which they did. The companies made Google the default search engine because of their own design choices; Google simply made an offer to meet the specifications.

The filing comes as the Justice Department and Google actively dispute how much access the company should have to third-party data submitted by competitors to a five-member Technical Committee overseeing implementation of the court’s remedies.

Google argued it must remain an “active participant” before the Technical Committee and have some visibility into competitor submissions. If Mehta adopts the Justice Department’s position, it would deny Google access to the evidence underlying the committee’s decisions and recommendations and would constitute a denial of due process, given the potential impact on its business.

In its appeal brief, Google criticized Mehta’s remedies as creating “ersatz,” or artificial, competition that would not emerge naturally and would not drive meaningful innovation.

Worse, the remedies are open to generative artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, which the company says could not have been affected by Google’s monopoly because “they did not even exist” until recently and are “already succeeding as wildly as any technology in human history without any need to free-ride on Google’s success.”

Google’s appeal follows a playbook established in the last landmark antitrust case, *United States v. Microsoft,*where a major breakup of Microsoft for monopolizing the web browser market foundered and resulted in a settlement.

The tech giant repeatedly cited the case throughout its brief, arguing that the case’s precedent established guardrails to ensure antitrust law is not used to punish vigorous competition.

“At bottom, the district court’s failure to heed the elemental distinction in antitrust law between conduct that harms competitors and conduct that harms the competitive process produced exactly the result that the law is designed to prevent,” Google concluded. “This is truly the case of a successful competitor being turned upon because it has won.”

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