That Lenient Monopoly Ruling from Last Year Is Being Appealed

Tech god-kings like Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai tend to win in the courts when it matters, and there’s very little chance that’s about to change, but there’s just the tiniest glimmer of hope all of a sudden.

Legal filings reported Tuesday by Bloomberg indicated that the ruling from September of last year in which Google basically got to continue being a monopoly without significant consequences could be getting another look. The entity that originally brought suit against Google, comprising multiple states and the Justice Department, is appealing that ruling. Should that make you optimistic? Probably not, but at least it’s happening.

In August of 2024, District Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled—to the surprise of many—that Google was a monopolist. Google, it was determined, had acted illegally to maintain its stranglehold on the search market. 

Google controls 90% of the search engine market, and does it stay on top like this by being the best? Anecdotally, you probably answered that question with something like “no!” or “not anymore!” Google results pages are larded with spam and AI outputs that Americans aren’t huge fans of, though they also report reading them without clicking to check the source articles they’re drawn from.

Google keeps its crown via some really ugly, but real, payola deals—like $20 billion to Apple and $8 billion over four years to Samsung—that require hardware makers to make Google the default search engine on the gadget you’re probably using to read this article.

Considering Google has been determined by a legal ruling to be a monopoly, some reasonable remedies might have been to force Google to end this pay-to-play practice. It could have also been forced to sell off Chrome, the most popular internet browser. 

But instead of something with teeth, we got a decision that must have been better than the best case scenario Google had in mind: forcing it to share some of its search data with competitors, and limiting the exclusivity of its paid deals with companies like Apple and Samsung while still allowing such exclusivity deals (as the New York Times notes, this part was both lenient and confusing).

So what does the appeal mean? Honestly it just means normal and predictable things are happening in response to a big ruling. The US Court of Appeals for D.C. tends to take about a year to come to a decision after a case reaches this point. The original remedies monopoly-haters wanted, a forced sale of Chrome, or the banning of search payola deals, are theoretically back on the table. But in the event of a ruling handing down a harsher remedy, it would of course be Alphabet Inc.’s prerogative to keep the appeals process going.