With Judge Mehta ruling that Google illegally maintained its monopoly in the general search and search advertising markets, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which is very likely to be appealed, all attention has turned to the question of what remedies the court will impose. A July 17 D.C. Bar Association panel, hosted by its Antitrust and Consumer Protection Community, explored the proposed remedies under consideration by Judge Mehta that would have for a range of stakeholders, including the small business technology developer community. During this event, legal and policy experts, including ACT | The App Association, gathered to assess the likely effects of proposed remedies, reflecting growing concern about their unintended consequences for innovation and the broader digital marketplace.
The discussion during the D.C. Bar event underscored how proposed remedies like divesting Google’s Chrome browser or restricting default agreements on devices could upend established relationships between Google, app developers, and the platforms they rely on. Panelists, echoing arguments from the App Association’s amicus brief, explained that the sweeping structural changes that Judge Mehta is considering run the risk of making digital distribution far more fragmented, increasing both compliance burdens and technical overhead for small businesses.
The App Association’s general counsel, Graham Dufault, pointed out that the plaintiffs’ proposed remedies would eliminate several things small business app companies demand from Google.
- PROPOSAL: Share Personal Search History
Requiring Google to share personal search history information may turn search into an untrusted or significantly less trusted product. Small businesses’ ability to leverage search platforms depends heavily on consumers trusting them, so a mandate for the most popular platform to share search history against consumers’ legitimate privacy expectations significantly undermines this foundation of trust. - PROPOSAL: Divest the Chrome Browser and Chromium Browser Engine
Splitting Chrome from Google would disintegrate the Chrome offering, making it a less powerful platform for small businesses to reach their intended markets. Similarly, since Chromium is the engine for other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Opera, disintegrating the open-source project from its most powerful contributor would weaken the foundations of other browsers and bring some of the most compelling browser competitors down a peg. - PROPOSAL: Stricter Review of Google Investment into AI
Subjecting any Google investment into artificial intelligence (AI) markets to greater scrutiny would create unnecessary barriers between small business innovators and access to capital from Google as they attempt to scale or enter into AI markets. - PROPOSAL: Restrictions on AI Integration into Search
Restrictions on integration of AI into Google Search also take away rather important pressure on other search engines to provide similar “overview” functions for consumers. If the most mature version of this offering goes away, we can expect lower quality offerings and weaker competition. - PROPOSAL: Ban on Default Placement Deals with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM)
The remedy to completely ban Google from paying other platforms for default placement is overly broad and would eliminate competition in the browser market by taking away important funding streams.
While at first these proposed remedies may seem to affect Google exclusively, by eliminating many of the most sought-after of Google’s offerings, they would directly harm a significant swathe of small business competitors in the app economy.
Graham also cautioned that Judge Mehta should account for the competitiveness of the markets for search services, much of which has developed since the plaintiffs first brought the complaint in 2020. He noted that the lines around the market definition leading to Google’s liability in this case have blurred significantly since 2020 and even since the liability determination in 2024, as consumers now treat some generative AI chatbots and social media platforms as interchangeable in relevant ways with general search.
One critical foundation of the court’s liability finding is the notion that distribution for search is hard to achieve at scale, making Google’s default agreements a near-impenetrable barrier to other search platforms’ competitive threats. But as other generative AI search platforms have emerged and shown themselves to be interchangeable with general search, they have done so with exceptionally powerful distribution built in. For example, ChatGPT surpassed 500 million weekly active users in early 2025, with Microsoft backing and built-in distribution as the first official Apple Intelligence partner. Similarly, xAI’s Grok-3 is integrated into the X platform, which has 550 million monthly users, marking another competitor with supposedly impossible-to-achieve distribution scale built in. Lastly, Meta’s AI chatbot had 700 million monthly active users in fourth quarter 2024, having been embedded into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger—arguably a more potent distribution combination than a default search arrangement with Safari and Firefox.
Graham argued that in selecting remedies, Judge Mehta should account for this demonstrable weakening of the assumptions on which liability was determined, and in particular that the market for search distribution itself is not nearly as unchallengeable as it likely appeared previously.
While we continue to disagree with Judge Mehta’s findings, the App Association’s perspective is that the remedies following this ruling should remain laser-focused on the court’s liability determination. Going beyond the conduct at issue—the specific default search agreements—or addressing that conduct with unnecessarily broad restrictions bears serious costs on App Association members’ competitive prospects. Blanket measures that eliminate the very services and offerings App Association members demand from platforms will drive up costs and impose legal uncertainty, advantaging larger competitors while raising our members’ barriers to entry and growth. At this critical stage in the case, Judge Mehta must fully consider the impacts on the broader small business community.
The D.C. Bar panel highlighted how important it will be that Judge Mehta’s interventions be targeted to address actual competitive harms without destabilizing the very ecosystem that fuels small-business innovation. You can find the full video of this timely discussion here: https://dcbar.inreachce.com/Details/Information/18562dda-41a5-4191-8074-8ee82b683a35.