Google asked a federal appeals court on Friday to reverse a landmark ruling that branded the company a monopolist in online search.
The Department of Justice sued Google in 2020, arguing that the tech giant had abused its monopoly to maintain its dominance over online search. In 2024, a district court judge agreed with the government, ruling that Google had broken the law when it paid companies including Apple and Mozilla to have its search engine appear as the first option on smartphones and in web browsers.
In a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Google said the district court judge, Amit P. Mehta, had improperly applied antitrust law in finding those deals were over the line. Judge Mehta had also overstepped when he issued a ruling to fix the monopoly concerns by forcing Google to share some data with its competitors, the company argued.
The appeal is the next turn in a yearslong battle between Google and the Department of Justice, which has resulted in the first major antitrust rulings against a tech giant in the modern internet era. The Justice Department also sued the company in 2023, claiming it had a monopoly in advertising technology. The government won that case, and the judge is expected to issue her decision on how to fix that monopoly this year.
In the search case, Judge Mehta’s ruling in 2024 on measures to address the monopoly, known as remedies, fell short of the breakup of Google that the government had sought. He said Google had to share some of the data that powered its search engine with competitors, which could include other search engines like Microsoft’s Bing and chatbots like ChatGPT.
In its appeal, Google took issue with both Judge Mehta’s original ruling, as well as his decision on remedies. The judge’s ruling that the company violated federal antitrust law was “as basic an error of antitrust law as a court can make,” Google said in its filing.
“The court’s own findings establish that Google’s conduct was lawful,” the company said in the filing. “It developed a superior search engine through hard work, bold innovation and shrewd business decisions.”
David McCabe is a Times reporter who covers the complex legal and policy issues created by the digital economy and new technologies.
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