Google appeals search monopoly ruling, says it won business ‘fair and square’

Google officially filed its appeal of the federal ruling deeming it an illegal search monopolist, arguing the decision “crashed” through legal guardrails. “Google just prevailed in the marketplace fair and square,” it writes in its legal filing.

Google had already said it would appeal the ruling, which includes both the August 2024 decision about its illegal monopolization and the September 2025 remedies decision that ordered it to share some search data with competitors. The appeal brief filed Friday gives more insight into how the company plans to fight Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling.

“We are asking the court to overturn this flawed decision – partners and users have many options and choose Google because it provides the best, most helpful results,” Google VP of regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a statement.

Google argues that Mehta erred in finding that its search distribution agreements with browser and device makers were anticompetitive. Instead, it argues, other market players simply preferred its services over rivals’. Mehta also “egregiously exceeded” his judicial discretion in the remedies he ordered, according to Google, which included the “extraordinary step of ordering Google to boost its competitors through data-transfer and syndication.” The company also takes issue with how the remedies require data sharing with generative AI players that it says “could not have been affected by Google’s conduct because they did not even exist during the relevant period, and that are already succeeding as wildly as any technology in human history without any need to free-ride on Google’s success.”

The US and a coalition of states that sued alongside it are also appealing the same decision, arguing that Mehta should have gone further in his remedies decision. Mehta declined to grant the government its biggest asks, including a sale of Google’s Chrome browser, which it argues is a key distribution platform for search offerings. The government argued that a broad sweep of changes was necessary to resolve Google’s harms to competition.

About five years since the initial case was filed, it’s now up to a federal appeals court in DC to determine what should happen next. From there, the case could eventually go all the way up to the Supreme Court.