Google's 2025 search remedies bar exclusive deals and open its data to rivals, with both sides appealing

On September 2, 2025, the US District Court for the District of Columbia set out how Google must change its business after it was found to have illegally maintained a monopoly in online search. The court barred Google from exclusive contracts for distributing Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app, ordered it to make some search index and user-interaction data available to rivals, and told it to offer them its search results and search ads through syndication, the Justice Department announced. Judge Amit P. Mehta entered the final judgment on December 5, 2025. It is now being put into practice, and both Google and the government have appealed.

How the case got here

The Justice Department sued in October 2020, during President Donald Trump's first term, with 11 state attorneys general. Other states brought a related case, and by the remedies stage 49 states, two territories and the District of Columbia had joined the United States. After a nine-week bench trial that began in September 2023, the court issued a 277-page opinion in August 2024 concluding that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” in breach of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. According to the department, Google handled about 90% of US search queries for years and used exclusionary agreements to be the preset default search engine on billions of mobile devices and computers. A 15-day trial on remedies followed in 2025.

What the court ordered

The remedies target the deals through which people reach a search engine. Google may not make the licensing of Google Play or its other apps conditional on device makers carrying Google Search, Chrome, Assistant or its generative AI products, nor pay for one placement on condition of another, nor stop phone makers and carriers from also offering rival search engines, browsers or AI products. Any agreement that pays for distributing or placing those products must end within a year. Google can still pay to be the default: deals with browser makers and with Apple may include a default condition, but they must expire after a year and expressly allow the partner to promote rival search and AI services.

The data remedies go to “qualified competitors”: companies that meet security standards approved by the plaintiffs, accept audits, show a plan to compete in general search or search advertising and pose no risk to US national security. Within 30 days of a competitor's certification, Google must provide certain data about its web search index at marginal cost. Over the judgment's term it must also share, at least twice, user-side data behind two of its ranking systems, known as Glue and RankEmbed. Algorithms, ranking signals and post-trained large language models are excluded. The department said the remedies reach generative AI companies too, so that Google cannot repeat its tactics in that market.

Google must also offer qualified competitors five-year licenses to its search results and its search text ads, so they can serve them while building their own capacity. In the first year, a competitor's use of Google's syndicated results is capped at 40% of its annual US queries, a share meant to fall over five years. A court-appointed technical committee of five members oversees compliance and can see Google's source code and algorithms under a confidentiality agreement. The judgment took effect 60 days after it was entered and expires six years later, unless the court extends or ends it.

Google's objections and the appeals

Google disputes the ruling. On the day of the remedies decision, Lee-Anne Mulholland, its vice president for regulatory affairs, said the company had “concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy,” and noted that the court had declined to order the sale of Chrome or Android. On January 16, 2026, Google filed its notice of appeal and asked the court to pause the data-sharing and syndication remedies during the appeal, arguing that they “would risk Americans' privacy and discourage competitors from building their own products.”

In the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Google challenges the court's definition of the search market, its monopoly findings, its conclusion that the default deals were exclusive in practice and harmed competition, and the data-sharing and syndication remedies, including their extension to generative AI companies, according to the government's brief of October 21, 2026. The government defends the ruling but cross-appeals on one point: the district court's refusal to ban Google's search-related payments to distributors without first deciding whether remedies lacking such a ban would restore competition. The brief notes that oral argument had not yet been scheduled.

What is happening now

While the appeal runs, the judgment is being set up. In a status report filed on September 17, 2026, the plaintiffs said all five committee members had been fully onboarded by June 15 and the committee was hiring staff, but that a dispute over the agreement giving it access to Google's source code was holding up its work. The procedures for certifying qualified competitors were still being drawn up and would be made public, they said, and Google had answered the committee's information requests and continued preparing to meet the data-sharing and syndication requirements. On October 13, 2026, the plaintiffs filed recommended template licenses for search and search-ads syndication, with Google's objections attached.

The government has signaled it wants more. When the remedies were announced, Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater said the department would consider “next steps regarding seeking additional relief,” and the cross-appeal now asks the appeals court to revisit the payment question. Google's request for a pause, for its part, covered only the data-sharing and syndication remedies, not the limits on its distribution deals.