Google has announced that t plans to appeal a US antitrust ruling after a federal judge proposed milder remedies than those sought by antitrust regulators to address the company’s dominance in online search. The update follows a Friday (May 30) hearing in Washington, where US District Judge Amit Mehta heard closing arguments on how to remedy Google's illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and a group of state attorneys general are seeking strong corrective measures, including forcing Google to share search data and stop paying billions to Apple and other smartphone makers to remain the default search engine on their devices.Judge Mehta, however, has suggested less aggressive options than the DOJ’s proposal for a 10-year regulatory regime. The DOJ has expressed concern that Google’s dominance in search also boosts its competitive edge in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), particularly through products such as Gemini.

Google, in a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter), said that it will wait for the decision and believes "the Court's original decision was wrong".Yesterday, we made closing arguments in the DOJ search remedies trial. The DOJ’s proposed remedies go miles beyond the Court’s decision & would harm consumers, businesses and America’s tech leadership. Here are a few key points from our arguments. ⬇️1/ DOJ waved off very real privacy issues, saying they’d be resolved later on. In fact, one DOJ lawyer said “the only thing we can do is give [rivals] more data.” 🤔2/ When confronted with significant questions left open by their proposals (i.e. how much data should Google be forced to share?), DOJ just said it could all be worked out by a “Technical Committee” of mostly govt-appointed experts.3/ The DOJ’s proposal reserves the right for the government to decide who gets Google users’ data. Not the Court.4/ The DOJ spent many hours trying to convince the Court to remake the tech sector. Meanwhile it’s very clear the AI space is highly competitive today: Countless rivals in the AI space are growing fast & gaining users & distribution without government intervention.5/ While we heard a lot about how the remedies would help various well-funded competitors (w/ repeated references to Bing), we heard very little about how all this helps consumers.6/ We will wait for the Court’s opinion. And we still strongly believe the Court’s original decision was wrong, and look forward to our eventual appeal.

Previously in a separate case, the DOJ sought Google's divestment of parts of its ad tech business, specifically

Google Ad Manager

, which includes its publisher ad server and ad exchange platform. A federal judge ruled that Google unlawfully controlled key parts of the digital advertising market.