Google antitrust remedies

Judge Amit Mehta entered findings of fact and conclusions of law on August 5, 2024^[1], holding Google liable under Section 2 of the Sherman Act for unlawfully maintaining monopolies in general search services and general search text advertising^[2]. The court issued its remedies opinion on September 2, 2025^[3]. It rejected the more severe proposals put to it: divestiture of Chrome, mandated choice screens and a complete payment ban^[5]. Payments for defaults continue, but no agreement conditioning consideration on the distribution or placement of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant or a Google GenAI product may run longer than a year^[6].

Section IV of the judgment requires Google to make available to a certified competitor, for each document in its web search index, a document identifier, a duplicate notation, a document-to-URL map and four crawl fields: first-seen time, last-crawled time, spam score and device-type flag^[7]. The same competitors receive the user-side data behind the GLUE and RankEmbed models, at marginal cost and on at least two occasions^[8]. Those disclosures do not reach intellectual property or trade secrets such as algorithms, ranking signals or post-trained language models^[10]. Section V adds a real-time syndication API carrying desktop and mobile ranked organic results^[9], limited to queries originating in the United States from human end users^[11] and tapering across a five-year period^[12].

Only a certified qualified competitor may take the data. Certification turns on the data security standards recommended by the technical committee, a showing of a plan to invest and compete in general search or search text ads, and the absence of a national security risk^[13], and it lapses unless renewed each year^[14]. The definition of competitor covers providers of a GenAI product alongside general search engines and search text ad platforms^[15], so an answer engine can be certified without running a general search engine of its own. The court named Microsoft, DuckDuckGo and OpenAI as companies already competing that will face no red tape in getting recertified^[16].

The judgment was entered on December 5, 2025^[4], took effect sixty days after entry^[17] and expires six years from that effective date^[18]. A technical committee recommends the security standards a qualified competitor must meet and runs the audits behind them^[13]; the court appointed its first members on January 21, 2026 and a fourth and fifth on May 9, 2026^[19]. Both sides then appealed. The case sits before the DC Circuit as No. 26-5023, where the United States filed its response and cross-appeal opening brief on July 28, 2026^[20].

A certified competitor gets index metadata^[7] and syndicated results^[9], while the disclosures stop short of algorithms and ranking signals^[10]. Syndication is confined to United States queries from human end users^[11] and its volume falls across five years, on the expectation that competitors invest in their own search capability^[12]. For generative engine optimization the judgment rewrites the contracts around Google Search rather than its ownership: Chrome is not divested^[5] and payments for defaults continue in one-year terms^[6].