Washington, D.C. — Following the release of Google’s proposed remedies in the Google search case last Friday, which comes after the Big Tech monopoly lost to the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement.

“Google’s proposal to address over a decade of market-strangling monopoly misconduct by making certain contracts temporarily less exclusionary for a few years is a meager, diet remedy,” said Laurel Kilgour, Research Manager at the American Economic Liberties Project. “After a 10-week trial and a mountain of evidence, a court of law found Google guilty of illegally maintaining a monopoly grip on the search engine market. Google’s proposed remedy ignores the fundamental aim of a remedy order: to fix the market Google broke by reopening it to full and fair competition. The DOJ’s proposal from last month takes that goal seriously; Google’s does not, and instead asks for the court’s blessing to largely maintain its chokehold over search distribution channels after a very short period limiting certain contractual practices.”

“Google also ignores the basic legal principle that wrongdoers must be deprived of the fruits of their ill-gotten gains—which, in this case, includes data and other aspects of the Google’s conglomerate empire,” added Kilgour. “This proposal suggests perhaps the weakest remedy for a Sherman Act Section 2 violation in history—far weaker than what was ultimately ordered in the Microsoft case—and would embolden other monopolists to destroy evidence and break the law without fear of facing the heat of competition on the merits ever again.”

Judge Mehta’s opinion found that the “general search market has remained static for at least the last 15 years,” and the “foreclosure of efficient channels of distribution has contributed significantly to the lack of new investment” in competitors. Thanks to illegal default agreements that “deny rivals access to user queries, or scale, needed to effectively compete,” Google ensured that it “receives billions of queries every day” that provide “extraordinary volumes of user data,” further entrenching its monopoly. As Economic Liberties outlined in a remedies white paper last month, courts have held that remedies in antitrust cases must “unfetter a market from anticompetitive conduct and pry open to competition a market that has been closed by defendants’ illegal restraints” Google’s proposed remedy does not achieve these objectives. Effective antitrust remedies should also deprive the monopolist of ill-gotten gains and ensure the monopoly power cannot reemerge. This requires structural changes coupled with significant behavioral constraints.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has proposed more effective measures to address Google’s monopolistic practices. These include requiring Google to sell off its Chrome browser (and potentially its Android operating system, if after a reasonable period of time other measures do not actually restore “workable competition”), as well as prohibiting exclusive agreements that make Google the default search engine on devices like iPhones. The DOJ also requests that Google be ordered to share its search data with competitors to level the playing field. Such robust remedies are essential to dismantle Google’s monopoly and foster genuine competition in the search market. Both parties have now presented their briefs ahead of a remedies hearing in April 2025.

The remedy in the Microsoft case, required Microsoft, among other things, to disclose its application programming interfaces (APIs) to third-party developers, so there would be greater interoperability with its software products. This remedy was overseen by a technical committee. The remedy, although it did not go far enough in some ways, nonetheless opened the path for more innovation, turbocharged U.S. leadership in the nascent internet industry, and spurred new entrants—including Google itself.

Read “Google Broke Internet Search. It’s Time to Break Up Google” here. 

Read Economic Liberties’ letter urging the State Bar of California to investigate Google executive Kent Walker’s violation of lawyers’ ethics rules by destroying evidence here.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.

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The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.