Google Lost Its Search Monopoly Case, and the Remedy Still Left Chrome in Place

The number that won the case was $26.3 billion. That is what Google paid in 2021 to Apple, phone makers, wireless carriers and browser companies to make its search engine the default on their devices and software, according to evidence at trial. It is a strange thing for a company to spend if it believes, as Google long said, that people choose its search engine simply because it is the best. On August 5, 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the federal district court in Washington concluded that the payments were not a sign of a healthy market but a way of locking one up. "Google is a monopolist," he wrote, "and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly." A little more than a year later, he decided what to do about it, and the answer surprised people on both sides.

In short: Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google illegally maintained its monopoly in general search through exclusive default deals. In September 2025 he rejected the government's request to force a sale of Chrome, allowed Google to keep paying for default placement, and instead banned exclusive contracts and ordered Google to share some search data with rivals. Whether that is enough to open the market is the central question of tech enforcement now.

How the case began, and who brought it

The lawsuit was filed in October 2020 by the Justice Department during Donald Trump's first term, joined by a group of states, mostly with Republican attorneys general. A separate group of states, led by Colorado and Nebraska, filed a related case. The Biden administration took it over and carried it to trial in the fall of 2023. That bipartisan lineage is worth stating clearly. Antitrust action against Google was not invented by one party. It was started under a Republican president, argued under a Democratic one, and decided in remedies while a Republican was back in office.

The theory was close kin to the one the government used against Microsoft in 1998. Google had a dominant search engine. It secured that dominance by paying to be the preset choice wherever people searched: in Apple's Safari browser, on Android phones, in Mozilla's Firefox and through carriers. Because most people never change a default, those deals gave Google a steady flow of queries that rivals could not match. And because a search engine improves as it sees more searches and learns which results people click, scale made Google better and the gap wider.

Google's defence was simple and not frivolous. People use Google because it is good. Bing has always been one click away. The deals were competition for distribution, the same way cereal brands pay for shelf space, and Apple chose Google because it was the best product for its customers.

Google also argued that the payments benefited consumers indirectly. The money helped fund Firefox, a nonprofit-backed browser, and let phone makers keep device prices down. Those points carried some weight with the judge later, when he decided what to do. At the liability stage, though, the question was narrower: whether the deals, taken together, shut rivals out of the scale they needed to compete. On that question the evidence went against Google.

What the judge found

Judge Mehta accepted much of Google's argument about quality. He wrote that Google's search engine was widely regarded as the best and that its success was partly earned. But he found that the exclusive distribution agreements were anticompetitive because they foreclosed rivals from a large share of the places where search happens, denied them the scale they needed to improve, and let Google raise the prices of its search text ads without losing business.

He defined two relevant markets in which Google held monopoly power: general search services and general search text advertising. He rejected the government's broader claim about a search advertising market, and he rejected some of the states' claims about Google's search advertising tool. But the core holding was clear. Google had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

Evidence at trial also showed the scale of what Apple received. Apple was paid billions of dollars a year, a share of the advertising revenue from searches on its devices. The judge found that payments on that scale gave Apple a powerful reason not to build a search engine of its own. That is the kind of detail that makes the government's theory concrete. The default deals did not just exclude rivals. They paid the most plausible rival not to enter.

The remedies the government asked for

After the liability ruling, the Justice Department asked for a sweeping set of remedies. Its central request was that Google be forced to sell Chrome, the most popular web browser in the world, on the theory that owning the browser gave Google a permanent default and a gateway to user data. It also asked that Google be barred from paying for default placement at all, required to share large amounts of search data with rivals, and potentially required to sell Android if the other measures failed.

The government's argument for a Chrome sale was rooted in the logic of structural remedies. Rules about contracts can be evaded or ignored; separating the browser from the search engine changes the incentives permanently. Supporters pointed to the AT&T breakup in the 1980s as a precedent for separating a company's bottleneck from the business that benefits from it.

What Mehta chose and what he rejected

On September 2, 2025, Judge Mehta issued his remedies decision. He rejected the Chrome sale. He wrote that the government had overreached, that Chrome had not been used for the illegal conduct in the way the default deals had, and that a forced sale would be messy and risky for users. He also rejected a forced sale of Android.

He declined to ban default payments. This is the part that surprised many observers. His reasoning focused on the companies on the receiving end. Mozilla depends heavily on Google's payments to fund Firefox; smaller phone makers and carriers would lose revenue; and Apple would likely keep choosing Google anyway, just without being paid, so consumers would gain nothing. Banning payments, he concluded, would harm the partners without helping competitors much.

What he did order was narrower. Google may not enter exclusive contracts for distributing Search, Chrome, Google Assistant or its Gemini AI app. Partners can be paid to make Google the default, but they must be free to promote rival search engines and AI products too. Google must share certain parts of its search index and some data about user interactions with qualified competitors, and offer search results and search text ads to rivals through syndication on commercial terms. A technical committee will help oversee compliance. The judgment runs for six years.

Generative AI ran through the whole decision. Mehta noted that AI chatbots and assistants had emerged as a potential new form of competition since the trial and wrote that the market had changed in ways a court had to account for. Investors read the decision as a win for Google. Shares of its parent company, Alphabet, rose sharply the next day, and so did Apple's.

The honest case for the judge's caution

It is worth giving Judge Mehta his due before criticizing him.

Courts are not regulators. They are poorly suited to restructuring a complex company and supervising the result. A forced Chrome sale would raise hard questions about who could afford to buy it, whether a new owner could maintain it without Google's revenue, and whether the buyer would simply sell default placement back to Google. Rules focused on the precise harm, exclusive dealing, are easier to justify on appeal and harder to overturn.

His point about AI also has force. If AI products become the way people find information, the most valuable thing a court can do is keep Google from locking up distribution of those products the way it locked up search. Banning exclusive AI deals does that directly.

Why I think the remedy falls short

Here is the argument on the other side. The theory of the case was that Google's scale advantage, built on years of illegally secured defaults, now feeds on itself. Ending exclusivity going forward does not undo that advantage. If partners keep getting paid to make Google the default, and almost everyone keeps the default, the flow of queries continues much as before.

Data sharing is the remedy meant to close that gap, and its value depends entirely on details: how much data, on what terms, at what price, with what privacy protections, and with what enforcement when Google drags its feet. Experience with behavioral remedies, including the conduct rules that came out of the Microsoft case, suggests those details are where remedies go to die. The dominant firm controls the information, the engineers and the timeline. The government has to notice and prove each failure.

And there is the political point. Remedies that require years of oversight depend on enforcers who want to enforce. Over a six-year judgment, the Justice Department will be led by different people with different priorities. A structural remedy, once done, does not depend on who runs the antitrust division next.

The people this is about

It is easy to treat a case like this as a fight among billionaires. It is not. Search is how small businesses are found, how local news reaches readers, and how people look for doctors, jobs and benefits. When one company controls that gateway, it decides how much of the value goes to the businesses on the other side. Higher search ad prices are a tax on every florist, plumber and independent bookstore that has to buy ads to be found. Publishers whose traffic depends on search have little power to negotiate. Competition in search is not abstract. It is about whether the gateway to the internet is a market or a toll booth.

Do defaults really decide anything?

A skeptic might say the whole case rests on a strange premise: that people are so passive they will use whatever search engine their phone comes with. If Google is really the best, wouldn't people pick it anyway?

The evidence in the case, and outside it, suggests defaults are extraordinarily powerful. Few people ever change them, on phones or in browsers. That is not because people are foolish. It is because changing a setting takes effort, many people do not know it is possible, and the default usually works well enough. Companies know this better than anyone, which is why Google paid so much to hold the defaults and why Microsoft spent years trying to win them for Bing. A company does not spend tens of billions of dollars a year on something that does not matter.

Europe has tested one answer. Under its Digital Markets Act, the largest platforms have had to show users a choice screen for search engines and browsers since March 2024. A choice screen helps people who want an alternative find one. It does not create good alternatives where none exist.

That is the deeper problem the data-sharing remedy is meant to address. A rival search engine is only as good as the index behind it and the signals that tell it which results people find useful. Google built its index and its signals over decades, with the help of the very query flow the court found it had locked up. Giving qualified competitors access to some of that material is an attempt to let them start closer to the finish line. Whether it works will depend on how much they get, how fresh it is, how much it costs, and whether privacy protections leave it usable.

The AI wrinkle

The arrival of AI chatbots as a way to look things up cuts both ways for the case.

On one side, it suggests the search monopoly may be less permanent than it looked at trial. People now ask chatbots questions they once typed into a search box, and several well-funded companies are competing to become the new front door to information. On the other side, many of those AI products depend on search indexes, distribution deals and cloud infrastructure, and Google is a major player in all three. If the same distribution playbook is used for AI assistants, paying to be the preset choice on phones and in browsers, the new market could close up the way the old one did. The judge's ban on exclusive deals for Google's AI app is aimed at exactly that risk.

What you can do

The Google case is not over, and neither is the broader question of how to keep AI distribution open. Some steps:

1. Follow the appeal and any Supreme Court involvement. Google said it planned to appeal the liability ruling. Court Watch tracks the Supreme Court's opinions, the emergency docket and Senate votes on judges.
2. Ask Congress for clear rules on self-preferencing and default deals. Courts can only apply the law as written. Bills to bar dominant platforms from favoring their own products have had support from both parties in the past. Find your members of Congress by address and ask where they stand.
3. Watch for bipartisan wins on competition. The bills-both-parties-passed list shows legislation that drew votes across party lines, a reminder that competition policy has not always split along party lines.
4. Keep reading. Our topic page on corporate power gathers reporting on concentration in tech and beyond.

Chrome stayed with Google. The default deals stay too, minus exclusivity. Whether that is the beginning of competition in search or a polite way of leaving it as it was will depend on how hard anyone pushes for the details.