Google asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday to reverse a 2024 ruling that branded the company a monopolist in online search, arguing that District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta improperly applied antitrust law when he found that Google's deals to be the default search engine on devices from Apple and Mozilla crossed the line. The original case, brought by the Department of Justice in 2020, resulted in remedies that fell short of a breakup but required Google to share some of the data powering its search engine with competitors including Bing and ChatGPT. In its appeal, Google called the ruling “as basic an error of antitrust law as a court can make,” arguing it “developed a superior search engine through hard work, bold innovation and shrewd business decisions,” with a separate 2023 DOJ case over Google's ad technology monopoly still awaiting a remedies decision expected this year.
