Google is challenging the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) ruling that mandates it share its proprietary data with rival companies, according to a blog post by Google’s Vice President for Regulatory Affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland. The company said it is appealing the court’s ruling and has sought to block remedies that would require it to share search-related data through a syndication service to qualified competitors, as proposed by a US District Court judge in the District of Columbia.
The search engine giant is contesting a 2025 order by Judge Amit Mehta, which mandated that Google share its proprietary data with rival companies as one of the remedies imposed for its monopoly in the search and digital advertising markets.
The Context:
The DOJ’s revised final judgment in the five-year-long dispute between the DOJ and Google argues that data-sharing remedies would help Google’s rivals and new entrants improve search quality and build new features over time. To weaken Google’s search monopoly, the court ordered the company to periodically share specified datasets with qualified competitors.
Some of the user-level data includes:
- Popularity
- Quality measures, which often rely on backlink analytics to assess whether content is authoritative and trustworthy
- The time when a URL was first seen
- Time when the URL was last crawled
- Spam score, used to determine whether search rankings are being manipulated
- Device-type flag, indicating how a website or app is accessed across different device categories
- Any other specified signal (read data) that the proposed Technical Committee recommends as significant for ranking search results
The court also ordered Google to share data related to DocID and the DocID-to-URL map. DocID is a printable 7-bit character code identifier that allows documents to be retrieved directly from the index without running an additional search query. Similarly, the DocID-to-URL map links each unique DocID to its corresponding web address.
However, the court specifically exempted advertisement-related data from the data-sharing remedies.
Why doesn’t Google want to share the data?
During the court proceedings, Kevin Murphy, Google’s economics and industrial organisation expert, argued that requiring Google to disclose data periodically for up to 10 years would disincentivise innovation because the company would no longer retain the full returns on its search-related investments.
“Progress happens through the competitive process,” Murphy argued. He added that such measures could weaken competitors’ incentives by allowing them to benefit from Google’s innovations rather than investing in their own research. While data-sharing remedies might speed progress by offering a shortcut, he said, they would come at the cost of reduced incentives for further innovation.
Among its objections, Google pointed to the 1998 Microsoft antitrust case, in which a US court…
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