• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

Antitrust enforcers are urging an appellate court to uphold a trial judge's finding that Google unlawfully monopolized search by arranging to serve as the default search engine on browsers operated by Apple and Mozilla, as well as on Android devices.

But the authorities also want the court to reverse the judge's decision allowing Google to continue to make payments to Apple and other companies that distribute Google's search engine.

Without a ban on such payments, Google "can continue leveraging its monopoly profits -- which its unlawful conduct enhanced -- to secure future search-default deals, keeping the ecosystem frozen," the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states argued in an appellate brief filed late Tuesday with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The new papers come in an antitrust battle dating to 2020, when federal and state enforcers accused Google of violating anti-monopoly laws.

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., sided against Google after presiding over a trial. Mehta said in an August 2024 ruling that Google unlawfully maintained a monopoly in two markets: general search services, and search text ads.

The judge added that Google "exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive prices for general search text ads."

In September 2025, Mehta issued a remedies order that requires Google to share some data about users' searches with "qualified" competitors and to provide syndicated search results and ads to those competitors.

The order also prohibits Google from entering into exclusive distribution contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app for six years, but allows the company to continue to make payments for search-ad revenue or distribution to Apple, Mozilla and others.

Mehta said banning payments to those companies "would have profound impacts on them and the related markets in which they operate."

He added that prohibiting payments would force distributors to either continue offering Google as a default search engine without receiving revenue, or entering into agreements with "lesser quality" search engines "to ensure that some payments continue."

In May, Google urged the appellate court to reverse Mehta's liability finding or, at minimum, to reverse the provisions of the remedies order that require Google to share data about users' searches with competitors, and to provide syndicated search results and ads to competitors.

Among other arguments, Google said its agreements with Apple and Mozilla were "lawful competition, not unlawful exclusion."

"The browser-makers -- not Google -- made the decision to have a single out-of-the-box default, and they did so for the procompetitive reason of improving their users’ experience," Google argued.

The company added that those agreements were not exclusive, writing that Apple and Mozilla were always able "to promote and meet users’ demand" for rival search engines.

The Justice Department and states counter in their new papers that Google's search partnerships "gave it a stranglehold over distribution -- preventing rivals from efficiently reaching consumers and making search a 'no fly zone' for venture-capital investment."

The authorities add: "Google’s agreements foreclosed rivals from competing for a substantial portion of queries; deprived rivals of the scale needed to improve their quality and compete effectively; and disincentivized actual and potential rivals (like Apple) from investing in search."

The government is also asking the D.C. Circuit to uphold the portion of the remedies order requiring Google to share information with competitors, writing that those mandates are "important measures that will help thaw the search ecosystem that Google has frozen for over a decade."

But the antitrust enforcers seek to reverse Mehta's decision to allow Google to continue making payments to search distributors.

Among other arguments, the Justice Department and states say Mehta should not have taken into account the impact that stopping revenue-sharing payments would have on Apple, Mozilla and others.

"The court’s fears about what might happen in the short term if Google were barred from sharing its monopoly rents were no reason to forgo relief needed to make the monopolized markets competitive again," the government attorneys contend.

Google is expected to respond to the arguments by late September.