• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 21, 2025

The remedies phase of Google Search's monopoly trial took the company back into court on Monday for a trial that is likely to last for several weeks.

The company could be forced to share "sensitive and private search queries with companies" users may have never heard of, jeopardizing privacy and security.

That is one of Google’s arguments against the remedies proposed by the U.S. Department of Justice and several state attorneys general who advocate to U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta. 

Mehta ruled in August that Google illegally maintains a monopoly in the search business with practices like paying Apple to make its search engine the default option.

Google Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland wrote in a blog post that the company will appeal the judge’s decision in the lawsuit, and listed several concerns such as making it more difficult for users to access preferred services.

“People use Google because they want to, not because they have to,” she wrote. “DOJ's proposal would force browsers and phones to default to search services like Microsoft’s Bing, making it harder for you to access Google.”

It also would “hamstring how we develop AI, and have a government-appointed committee regulate the design and development of our products. That would hold back American innovation at a critical juncture.” Other concerns were also cited.

Apple and Mozilla, which also has an agreement with Google, have tried to advocate on the Alphabet company’s behalf.

“I often have conversations about the future of this company,” Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers wrote in a blog post. “Most times these conversations are tied to how we build a better Internet that is accessible to everyone. It’s never about maximizing profits because we aren’t owned by billionaires and our lone shareholder is a non-profit whose mission is to build an open and secure internet ecosystem that places privacy, security and the rights of individuals over the bottom line.”

She explains how some of the remedies proposed in the case risk the future of Firefox’s browser and Gecko browser engine, which she calls the “last remaining non-Big Tech browser engine.”

Mozilla supports the DOJ’s efforts to improve competition in various digital markets, but the company is concerned that the proposed remedies in the search case will do much more harm than good and unnecessarily seek to promote search competition at the expense of browser and browser engine competition.

“If the Department of Justice truly wants to fix competition, they can’t solve one problem by creating another,” she wrote.

The DOJ’s proposal to split off Chrome and Android -- which the company has built over the years and made available for free -- would break those platforms, hurt businesses built on them, and undermine security, according to Google.