Google is pressing its bid to stay orders requiring
it to share some data about users' searches with "qualified" competitors and to provide syndicated search results and ads to those competitors.
Unless stayed, those orders
"would require Google to irreversibly disclose and share valuable assets and user data with its competitors while its appeal is pending," the company writes in papers filed Friday with U.S. District
Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C.
"Disclosing confidential business information to competitors and supplying them with valuable assets ... are paradigmatic forms of
irreparable harm," the company argues.
"The public interest favors a stay because non-parties have an interest in what happens to their search queries and because of the
numerous and significant risks to user privacy that are inherent in the disclosure of user-side data," Google adds.
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Google's new papers mark the latest development in an
antitrust battle dating to 2020, when the federal Department of Justice and a coalition of states accused the company of violating anti-monopoly laws 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, ruling that the company maintained a
monopoly in two markets: general search services, and search text ads.
In September 2025, Mehta issued a remedies order that includes the data sharing and syndication
mandates that Google is now seeking 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.)
In January, Google
initiated an appeal of Mehta's ruling, and asked him to halt the data-sharing and syndication mandates pending appeal. The company argued that the disclosures could hurt search advertisers, and
threaten users' privacy.
Government antitrust enforcers opposed Google's request, arguing that it's 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 argued.
Google attorneys counter in their new riling that delaying its request could
resulted in emergency filings down the line.
"Google assumed that the court prefers not to receive emergency motions addressing issues that have been apparent to the parties
for months," counsel for Google writes.
The company adds that without a stay, it "could never recover the value of the search results, ads, and other intellectual property that
it would be compelled to license" to competitors.
Google also notes that Mehta previously acknowledged potential concerns regarding users' privacy.
When
Mehta entered the remedies order last year, he said Google had a "valid concern" regarding privacy, but that experts testified "user privacy could be preserved with appropriate privacy-enhancing
techniques and methods."
"That is not to say that protecting privacy will be easy," Mehta wrote at the time, adding that "anonymizing and securing" large datasets while also
"attempting to optimize their usefulness" will be challenging.
Google's attorneys say in their new papers that there is "an inherent tension between disclosure and privacy,"
adding that the Department of Justice and states "have never articulated how they actually would protect privacy despite ample opportunity to do so and the Court’s acknowledgement that user
privacy 'is a valid concern.'”
Mehta hasn't yet said when he will rule on Google's motion.