Google and DOJ Both Appeal Search Antitrust Remedies

Judge Amit Mehta’s September 2025 remedies ruling in United States v. Google LLC — which rejected a forced sale of Chrome but banned exclusive default-placement contracts and ordered Google to license search data to rivals — became legally final in December 2025 and partly took effect in February 2026. Both Google and the Justice Department, joined by state attorneys general, are now appealing the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, with briefing still underway as of late August 2026. Meanwhile, the court-ordered Technical Committee tasked with implementing the data-sharing and syndication remedies is still being staffed and has not yet given any competitor access to Google’s search data.

Background: How the Case Reached This Point

The case began in October 2020, when the Justice Department and a group of states sued Google, alleging it illegally maintained a monopoly in general search and search text advertising through exclusive distribution deals — most notably the multibillion-dollar arrangement making Google the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser and on Android devices. After a nine-week bench trial, Judge Mehta ruled on August 5, 2024, that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” finding violations of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

A separate remedies trial followed in the spring of 2025 to determine what Google would have to do to fix the violation. The Justice Department asked the court to force Google to divest Chrome and, in the alternative, Android, to end its payments to Apple and other device makers for default placement, and to share Google’s search index and click-and-query data with competitors on an ongoing basis.

What Judge Mehta Actually Ordered

Mehta issued his remedies opinion on September 2, 2025. He declined to order a Chrome or Android breakup, writing that after two full trials “this court cannot find that Google’s market dominance is sufficiently attributable to its illegal conduct to justify divestiture,” and separately calling a forced sale “incredibly messy and highly risky.” Google was also permitted to keep paying Apple, Samsung and other partners to preload or default to Google Search and Chrome — so long as those contracts are no longer exclusive.

What the court did order: Google must end exclusive default-placement agreements for Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and Gemini; it must share search index and user-interaction data (excluding advertising data) with “qualified competitors” through a licensed data-access program; and it must offer search and search-text-ad syndication services to rivals. A Technical Committee was created to oversee compliance for six years.

On December 5, 2025, Mehta entered a Final Judgment and an accompanying 95-page memorandum opinion resolving disputes over how those remedies would work in practice. He rejected Google’s request for veto power over syndication terms — reasoning that it would let Google effectively refuse to serve privacy-focused rivals — and declined to require that competitors display search results in a format identical to Google’s. He also clarified that the Technical Committee functions as an enforcement arm for the government, though Google retains the right to raise objections to its actions.

Where Compliance Actually Stands

The non-exclusivity provisions governing default-placement contracts took effect on February 3, 2026. According to the plaintiffs’ first compliance status report filed May 4, 2026, Google’s counsel confirmed on February 27 that “all steps necessary to comply” with that portion of the order had been taken.

The data-sharing and syndication provisions are further behind. The five-member Technical Committee was not fully staffed until May 2026 — an order appointing the fourth and fifth members was entered May 9 — and the same status report noted the committee only became “fully engaged” on March 30, 2026. As of that filing, Google had not yet submitted a template data-sharing license, and the report set an August 3, 2026 deadline for that template. It also stated that meaningful competitor access to Google’s data was “unlikely before late fall 2026 or early winter 2027.”

Subsequent joint status reports filed through the summer — including ones dated July 22, July 30, August 6 and August 14, 2026 — describe ongoing negotiation over operational details: protections shielding Technical Committee staff from being compelled to testify about their work, indemnification arrangements for committee members, and restrictions on where departing committee staff can work afterward. On August 25, 2026, Mehta issued an order resolving several of those issues, granting committee staff qualified immunity from compelled testimony (except for willful misconduct) and approving a list of named competitors — including firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, DuckDuckGo and Brave — that departing staff must give notice before joining.

Both Sides Are Appealing

Google filed its notice of appeal in mid-January 2026, and its opening brief at the D.C. Circuit followed in May, according to court-appeal reporting and confirmed by the Justice Department’s own July 28, 2026 filing responding to it. Google is challenging both the underlying monopoly finding and the data-sharing remedy. The company has argued, in its public statements, that it faces “intense” competition and that “people can easily choose the services they want” — and separately asked Mehta to pause the data-sharing mandate while the appeal proceeds, warning it risked “losing trade secrets before a decision is made on its appeal.”

Mehta denied that stay request on May 8, 2026, ruling it premature: because “key details such as license terms, security and privacy safeguards, and who the qualified competitors will be are far from established,” Google could not yet show the irreparable harm needed to justify a pause, though the court said Google could renew the request once those details firm up.

The Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys general separately filed notice of a cross-appeal on February 3, 2026. Their combined response-and-opening brief, filed July 28, 2026, makes clear the cross-appeal is narrow: the government is not challenging Mehta’s rejection of Chrome divestiture. Instead, it argues the district court erred by rejecting a complete ban on default-placement payments “without first determining whether” a remedy lacking such a ban “would effectively redress Google’s violations and restore competition.” The brief also defends the underlying monopoly finding, citing Google’s roughly 89 percent share of general search queries, rising to about 95 percent on mobile devices, and argues Google’s decade of exclusive deals “foreclosed roughly half the search market” while “starv[ing] rivals of the data necessary to improve their products.”

Reactions From Both Sides

Google’s public response to the September 2025 ruling, issued through Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland, welcomed the decision not to force a Chrome or Android sale, saying the court “did recognize that divesting Chrome and Android would have gone beyond the case’s focus on search distribution, and would have harmed consumers and our partners.” The company also flagged concerns about the data-sharing requirement’s effect on user privacy, while noting it was “reviewing the decision closely.”

Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in a Justice Department statement, called the outcome “an important step forward in the Department of Justice’s ongoing fight to protect American consumers.” Justice Department officials have separately described the September remedies as too limited, arguing Google can still “outbid” rivals for default placement even under non-exclusive contract terms — the core rationale behind the government’s narrower cross-appeal on the payment ban.

Why This Matters Beyond Google

The case is widely described by legal commentators as the most significant U.S. monopolization remedy against a technology company since the Microsoft case of the early 2000s. Its outcome will shape how antitrust enforcers approach dominant AI-era platforms: the data-sharing remedy, in particular, is meant to give rival search and AI products — some coverage has noted disputes over whether newer entrants like Perplexity should qualify — access to the kind of query and click data that Google has accumulated over two decades. Google separately faces a distinct antitrust case over its advertising-technology business, decided by a different federal judge in Virginia, underscoring that the company’s search-monopoly remedies are one piece of a broader regulatory reckoning rather than the whole of it.

What Happens Next

Appellate briefing at the D.C. Circuit continued through the summer of 2026, with the government’s response and cross-appeal brief filed July 28. A date for oral argument had not been set as of the most recent public court filings reviewed for this article. Independent of the appeal, Google’s compliance obligations continue on their existing schedule: the Technical Committee is expected to keep working through the source-code and security-review agreements needed before any data license can be issued, with the government’s own filings estimating that competitors are unlikely to gain actual access to Google’s search data before late 2026 or early 2027 — meaning the remedy’s practical, competitive effects will likely lag well behind the legal fight over whether it should exist at all.

What Smashology verified

Evidence limits and unresolved questions

• The exact number of states that joined the February 2026 cross-appeal was not specified in the court filings or news coverage reviewed for this article; secondary sources gave inconsistent counts.
• No oral-argument date had been set for the D.C. Circuit appeal in the filings and reporting available at the time of writing; estimates of when a final appellate ruling might arrive vary across legal commentary and were not independently verifiable.
• The terms of the data-sharing license template — due under the compliance schedule — had not been made public as of the most recent status reports reviewed.
• Whether Google will renew its request to stay the data-sharing mandate, and how Judge Mehta would rule on a renewed request, is unresolved.
• The competitive effect of the remedies cannot yet be assessed empirically, since no qualified competitor had received data access as of the reports reviewed.

Sources

• Department of Justice, Antitrust Division: U.S. and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC case page
• Department of Justice: Final Judgment, Dec. 5, 2025
• Department of Justice: Memorandum Opinion, Dec. 5, 2025
• Department of Justice: Response Brief and Opening Brief on Cross-Appeal, filed July 28, 2026
• Department of Justice: Plaintiffs’ First Status Report on Google’s Compliance, May 4, 2026
• Department of Justice: Joint Status Report, Aug. 14, 2026
• Department of Justice: Order Regarding Certain Issues Raised at the July 14, 2026 Status Conference, Aug. 25, 2026
• Department of Justice: Department of Justice Wins Significant Remedies Against Google (press release)
• Google: Google’s statement on Sept. 2025 Search DOJ decision
• NPR: In a major antitrust ruling, a judge lets Google keep Chrome but levies other penalties
• CNBC: Google stock jumps 8% after search giant avoids worst-case penalties in antitrust case
• Courthouse News Service: Federal judge largely sides with DOJ in finalizing remedy for Google search monopoly
• Bloomberg: Google Search Ruling to be Appealed by DOJ, States
• Bloomberg: Google to Appeal US Court Ruling of Illegal Monopoly in Search
• MediaPost: Judge Won’t Immediately Pause Google Antitrust Order
• MediaPost: Google Appeals Antitrust Ruling, Seeks To Lift Data-Sharing Mandate
• Search Engine Land: DOJ and states appeal Google search antitrust remedies ruling
• Yahoo Finance/AP: US files appeal in Google search antitrust case
• Malay Mail: Google appeals US monopoly ruling, warns data-sharing order risks trade secrets

Method note: Smashology verified this account primarily against documents filed in United States v. Google LLC and posted on the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division case page — including the September 2025 remedies opinion, the December 2025 Final Judgment, and status reports and orders filed through August 2026 — supplemented by Google’s own public statement and reporting from wire services and legal-trade outlets. Where secondary reporting characterized the scope of the DOJ/states’ cross-appeal in ways that conflicted with the government’s own July 28, 2026 appellate brief, this article follows the primary filing. Claims that could not be confirmed against a court document, official statement, or a named outlet’s direct reporting — including precise state-appeal counts and an appellate decision timeline — are flagged above as unresolved rather than stated as fact.