Judge finalizes remedies in Google antitrust case

A U.S. judge on Friday added new details to the remedies resulting from Google’s antitrust case, finalizing the consequences the company faces after its defeat last year.

In mid-2024, Google was found to hold an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search, and in September of this year, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against the most severe consequences that were proposed by the Department of Justice, including a forced sale of Google’s Chrome browser.

Google was, however, ordered to loosen its hold on search data.

Mehta on Friday issued additional details for his ruling.

“The age-old saying ‘the devil is in the details’ may not have been devised with the drafting of an antitrust remedies judgment in mind, but it sure does fit,” Mehta wrote in one of the Friday filings.

Mehta wrote that Google can’t enter into any deal like the one it’s had with Apple “unless the agreement terminates no more than one year after the date it is entered.” Google pays billions of dollars per year to Apple to be the default search engine on the Safari browser on iPhones, Macs and iPads.

The judge’s ruling includes deals involving generative artificial intelligence products, and any “application, software, service, feature, tool, functionality, or product” that involve or use genAI or large language models.

GenAI “plays a significant role in these remedies,” Mehta wrote.

Mehta on Friday also included requirements on the makeup of a technical committee that will determine with whom Google must share its data. Committee “members shall be experts in some combination of software engineering, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, economics, behavioral science, and data privacy and data security,” the filing says.

The judge went on to say that no committee member can have a conflict of interest, such as having worked for Google or any of its competitors in the six months prior to or one year after serving in the role.

Mehta said the committee must “have access to Google’s source code and algorithms, subject to a confidentiality agreement,” and reiterated the web index data it will require Google to share with certain competitors. 

Google has to share some of the raw search interaction data it uses to train its ranking and AI systems, but not the actual algorithms. In September, Mehta said those data sets represent a “small fraction” of Google’s overall traffic, but argued the company’s models are trained on data that contributed to Google’s edge over competitors.

In August 2024, Mehta ruled that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act and held a monopoly in search and related advertising. The antitrust trial started in September 2023.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has previously said it will appeal the judge’s monopoly ruling.

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