Google on Friday asked a federal appeals court to overturn a landmark ruling that declared the company a monopoly in online search.
The Justice Department 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 display its search engine as the first option in smartphones and 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 by finding those deals overstepped the bounds. The company argued that Judge Mehta had also overstepped the mark when issuing the ruling by forcing Google to share certain data with its competitors.
The appeal marks the next turn in the years-long battle between Google and the Justice Department, resulting in the first major antitrust ruling against a tech giant in the modern Internet era. The Justice Department also sued the company in 2023, claiming it has a monopoly in ad technology. The government won that case, and the judge is expected to issue his decision this year on how to fix that monopoly.
In the Search case, Judge Mehta’s ruling on measures to address the monopoly in 2024, known as remedies, fell short of the breakup of Google that the government had sought. He said Google would have to share some of the data that powers 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 Judge Mehta’s original ruling as well as his decision on the treatment. The judge’s ruling that the company violated federal antitrust law, Google said in its filing, was “as basic an antitrust law error as a court can make.”
“The court’s own findings establish that Google’s conduct was lawful,” the company said in the filing. “It developed a better search engine through hard work, bold innovation, and smart business decisions.”
