In January, Alphabet passed Apple in market capitalization to become the second most valuable company in the world. Alphabet was worth $3.885 trillion. Apple sat at $3.846 trillion. Only Nvidia, at $4.595 trillion, was ahead.
That alone would be news. But the context makes it something else entirely. Courts had found that Google violated antitrust law in both general search services and general search text advertising. The Department of Justice asked judges to break the company apart, sell off Chrome, divest the Android operating system, and force the sale of its ad exchange. In the search case, the court rejected those proposed divestitures. In the ad-tech case, the government is still asking the judge to order a sale of Google’s ad exchange, and remedies are pending.
In this article, I’ll walk through every active Google antitrust thread, what courts have ordered, what’s still pending, and what the timelines mean. The gap between Google’s legal exposure and its market performance tells a story that matters for everyone working in search.
How We Got Here
When the DOJ’s search monopoly trial opened in 2023, the government argued that Google spent billions on exclusive deals with Apple, Samsung, and browser makers to lock in its position as the default search engine. The case centered on whether those deals maintained a monopoly or reflected a better product.
In 2024, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had maintained an illegal monopoly in general search services. It was the first time a federal court found a tech company had maintained an illegal monopoly since the Microsoft case in 2001.
Then came the remedies phase, where the real fight began. The DOJ wanted dramatic structural changes. Prosecutors laid out four options, including forcing Google to sell Chrome and potentially divesting Android. That was the peak fear moment for investors. It was also the point at which the case stopped being abstract legal theory and started having direct implications for how search distribution works.
What happened next surprised the industry.
The Search Case: Where It Stands
On Sept. 2, 2025, Judge Mehta issued his remedies opinion. He declined to order any divestitures. No Chrome sale. No Android breakup. No forced separation of search from the broader Alphabet structure.
His reasoning centered on AI. Mehta wrote that generative AI had changed the course of the case. He pointed to the competitive threat that AI chatbots posed to Google’s search business and concluded that the market was too dynamic for the kind of structural remedy the DOJ wanted.
Instead, Mehta ordered behavioral remedies. The final judgment, entered on Dec. 5, 2025, limits how Google can structure search distribution deals. Agreements are capped at one year and cannot be used to lock partners into defaults across multiple access points. The judgment includes provisions that require partners to have more flexibility to surface rival search options and, in some cases,…
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