• by Wendy Davis , 6 hours ago

Antitrust enforcers are opposing Google's request to stay an order that will require it to share some data about users' searches with "qualified" competitors and to provide syndicated search results and ads to those competitors.

In papers filed late last week with U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C, the Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general claim Google's request is premature because the data-sharing and syndication mandates won't take effect for many months.

"Given how much work remains to be done to operationalize the syndication and data-sharing remedies and how long that work will take, there is no basis for granting Google a stay now," the government attorneys write.

They are urging Mehta to deny Google's request for now, but allow it to renew the request in the future.

The antitrust enforcers' new papers come in a dispute dating to 2020, when the Justice Department and a coalition of states accused Google of obtaining dominance in search by contracting to be the default search engine in Mozilla's Firefox browser and Apple's Safari browser, and to have its search engine preinstalled on Android smartphones.

Mehta ruled against Google in August 2024, writing in a 286-page decision that the company violated antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in two markets: general search services, and search text ads.

He said in the ruling that Google "exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive prices for general search text ads."

In September 2025, Mehta issued a remedies order that includes the data sharing and syndication mandates that Google wants to stay. The order calls for a technical committee to implement the mandate -- including by establishing privacy protections. (The order also prohibits Google from entering into exclusive distribution contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app for six years.)

Last month, Google initiated an appeal of Mehta's ruling. The company also asked Mehta to stay the data-sharing and syndication mandates pending appeal, writing that those requirements "would be extraordinary under any circumstance," and "are legally impermissible in this case."

The company said the disclosures could hurt search advertisers, and threaten users' privacy.

"The public interest dictates that appellate review should occur before the private search queries of Google users are shared without their consent and before innovation and investment are permanently warped by compelled data disclosures and syndication," Google wrote.

"Google’s advertiser customers would face significant harm ... due to Google’s diminished ability to detect fraudulent schemes perpetrated on syndication and sub-syndication sites if Google is compelled to license ads to any Qualified Competitor," the company added.

The Justice Department and states argued late last week that those concerns are both "premature" and "speculative," noting that the mandates won't take effect until after the technical committee issues standards.

"The harms Google projects might occur when the sharing and syndication aspects of the Final Judgment come into force are not imminent -- they are distant," the antitrust enforcers write.

"Long before, and indeed in order for, data sharing and syndication remedies to take effect, the final parameters of the challenged remedies must be determined by the [technical committee], the parties, and the court," they add.

Mehta hasn't yet said when he will rule on Google's request.