Google fights monopoly ruling

Google does not want to share the data and results of its search engine with competitors in the search engine market – among other things, a US federal court ordered the company to do so last year in an antitrust case. The search engine giant is now appealing this decision.

In September 2025, US Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Google's search engine business is illegal. Google had to stop its payments to browser providers and hardware manufacturers. Previously, the internet giant paid billions to browser providers and hardware manufacturers to set Google Search as the default in the browser or the Chrome browser on end devices. Apple alone received around 20 billion US dollars annually. In addition, Google has had to share search data and search results with “qualified competitors” since then.

Google pleads legal error

In its appeal brief (download below this paragraph), Google now argues that US Judge Amit Mehta made legal errors in his 2024 ruling. The company argued that its deals with device manufacturers and browser developers did not prevent them from promoting competing search services like Microsoft's Bing.

Furthermore, the decision to offer an exclusive, pre-set search engine at all originated from Apple and Mozilla themselves, not from Google. Mozilla is now heavily dependent on Google's annual payments. According to the financial report, of around 680 million dollars in annual revenue in 2024, 498 million dollars came from Google – to ensure the search engine is pre-set in Firefox. Mozilla's CFO has already warned: Without Google's money, bankruptcy threatens.

Google also pleads that the company has fairly asserted itself in the market with its search engine by developing “a superior search engine through hard work, bold innovation, and smart business decisions.” The fact that search engine data now has to be shared with competitors would create a strange form of substitute competition that would never have arisen under real conditions. Here, Google explicitly names AI manufacturer OpenAI as an example, which would also have access to the data for its LLM ChatGPT. However, ChatGPT did not even exist during the relevant period – the US Department of Justice and federal states had already sued at the end of 2020. Furthermore, the success of ChatGPT is so groundbreaking that there is no reason to share the data with OpenAI, Google argues. Observers expect a legal reaction from the US Department of Justice to Google's appeal in July.

(nen)