Google Antitrust Lawsuit: Rulings, Remedies, and Ad Tech Case

The Google antitrust lawsuits have produced two federal court rulings that Google illegally maintained monopolies — one in internet search, one in digital advertising technology — along with a $700 million settlement over the Play Store and a jury verdict won by Epic Games. As of mid-2026, court-ordered remedies in the search case are in effect but not yet fully implemented, Google is appealing, and a remedies decision in the advertising case is still pending.¹

The Search Monopoly Ruling

On August 5, 2024, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a 277-page opinion finding that Google is a monopolist that acted illegally to maintain its dominance over internet search, in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.¹ The case had been filed by the Department of Justice in October 2020, with a separate complaint from 38 states in December 2020; the two were consolidated for a nine-week bench trial that began in September 2023.²

The conduct at the center of the ruling was Google’s distribution deals. Google paid Apple, Samsung, Verizon, and other device makers and browser developers tens of billions of dollars to set Google as the preset default search engine. The court found these arrangements functionally exclusive, foreclosing a substantial share of the market, starving rivals of the query data they needed to compete, and discouraging investment in potential challengers.³ Google’s payment to Apple alone reached roughly $20 billion in 2022, about 36% of the search advertising revenue Google earned through Safari.⁴

Judge Mehta acknowledged Google had built its dominance through legitimate competition at the outset but found the company then used its monopoly profits to buy preferential treatment, creating what he called a “self-reinforcing cycle of monopolization.” Google held roughly 90% of the U.S. search market and charged advertisers supracompetitive prices for search text ads.¹ The court did rule in Google’s favor on narrower claims, finding no viable market for “general search advertising” and declining to hold Google liable for conduct related to its SA360 advertising platform.³

What the Court Ordered Google to Do

After a 15-day remedies trial in May 2025 featuring testimony from OpenAI, Apple, and Perplexity executives, Judge Mehta issued his remedies decision on September 2, 2025. He rejected the Department of Justice’s most aggressive request — a forced sale of the Chrome browser — calling it “a poor fit for this case” and describing a divestiture as “incredibly messy and highly risky.” He also declined to order divestiture of Android. The rise of generative AI, he wrote, had “changed the course of this case.”⁵

The behavioral remedies the court did impose are these:

Google cannot enter or maintain agreements that condition the licensing or placement of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini on exclusivity. Partners must be free to preload competing search engines, browsers, and generative AI products.¹
Revenue-sharing agreements cannot lock in Google’s placement for more than one year.⁶
Google must share portions of its search index and user click-and-query data with qualifying competitors.⁷
Google must offer search and search-text-ad syndication services to competitors.¹
A three-member technical oversight committee monitors compliance and screens competitors for eligibility over a six-year period.⁷

Google can still pay Apple and other partners for search distribution, provided the deals are non-exclusive and last no longer than a year. Analysts noted the arrangement preserves most of the existing Apple-Google financial relationship in the near term.⁸

Where the Search Case Stands Now

Judge Mehta finalized the remedies on December 5, 2025, and they formally took effect on February 3, 2026.⁹ Google filed an appeal on January 16, 2026, arguing that the original ruling “ignored the reality that people use Google because they want to, not because they’re forced to” and that the data-sharing order “would risk Americans’ privacy and discourage competitors from building their own products.”¹⁰

Google asked Judge Mehta to pause the remedies during the appeal. He denied that request on May 8, 2026, finding Google had not shown irreparable harm. Google’s full appeal brief was filed with the D.C. Circuit on May 22, 2026, contending the trial court “improperly applied antitrust law.”¹¹ The Department of Justice has filed its own cross-appeal, signaling it may seek additional relief beyond what Judge Mehta ordered.¹ Oral arguments are not expected until late 2026 or early 2027.

Implementation is moving slowly. The three-member oversight committee was approved on January 21, 2026, but as of mid-2026 Google has not yet been required to hand over data because the committee has not finalized the license terms, privacy safeguards, or eligibility criteria for competitors.⁹

The Advertising Technology Case

A separate federal lawsuit targeted Google’s “ad-tech stack” — the tools publishers and advertisers use to buy and sell display ads on the open web. The Department of Justice, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and eventually 17 states filed suit in the Eastern District of Virginia in January 2023, alleging that Google spent more than 15 years buying up competitors and rigging its ad auctions.¹²

The government pointed to specific auction mechanics. “First Look” prioritized bids from Google’s own ad exchange, AdX, before considering competitors. “Last Look” let AdX adjust its bids after seeing the highest rival offer. “Unified Pricing” barred publishers from charging AdX higher prices than they charged competitors, even when AdX offered less value.¹³ The government also alleged Google forced publishers to use its ad server, DoubleClick for Publishers, alongside its exchange.

On April 17, 2025, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google violated antitrust law. She found Google had illegally monopolized both the publisher ad server market and the ad exchange market for open-web display advertising, and that tying its ad server to its exchange violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act. She wrote that Google “harmed Google’s publishing customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web” and noted the company had “destroyed and hid information that exposed its illegal conduct.”¹² Google prevailed on one claim: the court found the government did not prove a separate market for advertiser-side ad networks.¹³

A two-week remedies hearing wrapped up in October 2025. The Department of Justice is seeking structural relief: divestiture of Google’s ad exchange and its publisher ad server, plus public disclosure of the code powering the publisher tools. Google has proposed lighter behavioral changes, such as better integration with competitor products.¹⁴ Judge Brinkema has urged both sides to settle, but no settlement has materialized. Her remedies decision is still pending as of mid-2026, and Google has said it plans to appeal the liability finding once a final judgment is entered.¹⁵

The Play Store Settlement and Consumer Payments

Alongside the federal cases, Google settled a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands over its control of the Google Play Store. The states accused Google of monopolizing Android app distribution and in-app payments, using anticompetitive contracts to keep rival app stores off devices, paying developers to block competing stores, and creating technical barriers against direct app downloads.¹⁶

The $700 million settlement was announced in December 2023 and received final court approval on May 4, 2026. Of that total, $630 million goes to consumer restitution and $70 million to the states.¹⁷ Consumers who paid for apps or in-app content through Google Play between August 2016 and September 2023 qualify for automatic payments, delivered primarily through PayPal or Venmo without a claim form.¹⁸

Google also agreed to procompetitive business reforms lasting four to seven years, including letting developers use alternative billing systems, permitting third-party app installation with reduced security warnings, and ending contracts that required Play to be the only preloaded app store.¹⁶

The Epic Games Verdict

Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, sued Google in August 2020 over the same Play Store practices. In December 2023, a federal jury in the Northern District of California unanimously found Google had illegally monopolized the markets for Android app distribution and in-app billing services worldwide, excluding China.¹⁹

In October 2024, Judge James Donato entered a three-year permanent injunction requiring Google to carry rival app stores within the Play Store, make its app catalog available to those competitors, and let developers offer alternative payment channels. Google appealed, arguing the injunction would compromise device security. On July 31, 2025, the Ninth Circuit unanimously affirmed both the jury verdict and the injunction.²⁰ Google sought a stay from the Supreme Court. As of mid-2026, the catalog-access and rival-store-distribution requirements are under an administrative stay that expires on July 22, 2026, while other parts of the injunction — including the requirement to allow in-app links to third-party purchasing options — have already taken effect.²¹

The European Fine

The U.S. cases are not the only regulatory action against Google’s ad business. On September 5, 2025, the European Commission formally found Google guilty of abusing its dominant position in online display advertising, concluding that Google leveraged its publisher ad server and buying tools to favor its own ad exchange. The Commission imposed a €2.95 billion fine and signaled that structural remedies, potentially including divestiture, may be necessary because behavioral fixes were deemed insufficient. Google was given 60 days to propose compliance measures.²²

How AI Reshaped the Case

The search case was filed in 2020, before ChatGPT existed. By the time remedies were argued in 2025, the court was working out how to prevent Google from carrying its search dominance into the AI era. Judge Mehta acknowledged that generative AI poses a “competitive threat to general search engines” but was uncertain whether those systems would remain genuine competitors or whether Google would come to dominate that market as well.²³

The remedies were written to cover Google’s generative AI products, including Gemini. The exclusivity ban extends to AI distribution deals, and the data-sharing mandate is meant in part to give AI companies access to the web-index and interaction data they need. Testimony at the remedies trial revealed that Google paid Samsung “enormous sums” for Gemini app installs, and that Google DeepMind used data for “search AI products and features” even when publishers opted out of foundation model training.²⁴ The Trump administration, which continued to press the case after taking office in January 2025, dropped the earlier proposal to force Google to divest its AI investments and replaced it with a requirement that Google notify the Department of Justice of future AI-related transactions.¹⁰

Whether the remedies match the speed of the AI market is contested. Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT together captured 78% of AI search traffic as of December 2024, and generative AI search was growing 165 times faster than traditional organic search as of June 2025, though it still represented less than 1% of total website traffic.²⁵ Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of the search engine DuckDuckGo, called the court’s remedies a “nothingburger.”

Google’s Defense

Google’s position throughout has been that its search dominance reflects product quality, not anticompetitive behavior. In a blog post responding to the original 2020 complaint, Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer, wrote that “people use Google because they choose to, not because they’re forced to,” and compared the default-search agreements to paying for “eye-level shelf space” in a supermarket.²⁶

After the remedies ruling, Walker described the proposed Chrome sale as “unprecedented government overreach” and warned that data sharing would put “Americans’ privacy at risk.” He argued Google’s advantage comes from its algorithms, not raw data volume: “the key, in many cases, is not just the ingredients but the recipe you use to pull them together.”²⁷ In its January 2026 appeal filing, Google said the trial court “failed to account for the rapid pace of innovation and intense competition” and that the data-sharing mandate would “stifle the innovation that keeps the U.S. at the forefront of global technology.”¹⁰

Google still holds roughly 90% of the global search market as of August 2025.²⁵ Whether the court-ordered changes materially shift that share depends on how the oversight committee sets its data-sharing terms, how the D.C. Circuit rules on Google’s appeal, and what Judge Brinkema decides in the ad-tech case.

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