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The Justice Department wants Google to do the unthinkable: hand over the some of the data that made it dominant as part of its proposed remedies in its search antitrust case against the tech giant. Other potential remedies include a sell-off of its Chrome browser, and banning default placements on phones.
But the data is an important one: access and visibility to that data has helped underpin Google’s lucrative ad business and help drive Alphabet’s $2 trillion market cap.
However, rivals hoping this remedy will help them catch up may find the chips still stacked against them.
Sources say the move could level the playing field by giving competitors like Bing and DuckDuckGo access its search user data, the kind of behavioral signals that power Google’s dominance. But privacy risks to implementation hurdles that could render the plan unworkable.
The data includes click data—the links people click, how long they hover over results, and how they scroll through the page. The DOJ is also calling for Google to hand over query data, or the actual terms users are searching for. Together, these insights have long given Google an edge in decoding user intent and ranking the most relevant webpages.
“Google, because they are monopolist, attracts a huge amount of that user data,” said Jeff Cross, counsel at Smith, Gambrell & Russel. “If the goal is to restore competition, Google needs to turn over the user data that it stores.”
Google maintains that these remedies would not be in the best interest of web users, and will harm the U.S.’s global tech prowess, particularly against China.
Google has a network-effort feedback loop
One of Google’s tools, Query-based Salient Terms (QBST), helps the search engine figure out which words should surface in response to a person’s query. If someone searches “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” for instance, QBST nudges Google to prioritize results for “White House.” According to court filings, this system is trained on roughly 13 months of search data—a scale advantage so vast that presiding Judge Amit Mehta, in his 2024 opinion, noted it would take Bing more than 17 years to amass the same volume.
The filings also emphasize how much scale matters: Google processes nine times more queries than all of its rivals combined—and on mobile, that figure jumps to nineteen.
“User data improves search quality,” said Cross. “The better the query and the more efficient the search, the more users will be attracted. The more users, the more user data, and the more user data, the better the quality. It’s a network-effect feedback loop.”
The costs of storing and anonymizing personal data
Vidushi Dyall,director of legal analysis, Chamber of Progress, pointed out that the DOJ’s proposed remedy lacks necessary privacy guardrails.
If Google is forced to turn over sensitive information, there are questions about how rival companies—particularly smaller or less sophisticated players—will handle and securely store it.Even large firms, like Microsoft, have faced user data privacy breaches.
“Expecting lesser sophisticated rivals to guard that information is a big question mark,” she said.
Additionally, ensuring the anonymity of searcher identities is a challenge, Dyall added. The data must be stripped of identifiable markers like names or social security numbers to prevent any possibility of tracing it back to an individual–something the remedy doesn’t address today.
Google may not make this easy
Even if the court mandates data sharing, implementing the remedy may prove fraught. According to Alan Chapell, president of the law firm Chapell & Associates, Google is likely to raise significant privacy concerns—both real and strategic—as a way to slow or complicate access.
“Ultimately the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for anybody who’s trying to get the data,” Chapell said.
As part of this remedy, the DOJ suggests establishing a technical committee to monitor Google’s compliance. But there’s ambiguity surrounds the makeup of that committee, said Chapell, who argued that the lack of clarity here could further weaken the impact of the DOJ’s remedy.
Would a Chrome sale be simpler?
Even if Google were to spin off Chrome, people might still choose to use Google’s search engine out of habit and, potentially, preference.Court filings reveal, Apple’s svp of services, Eddy Cue, testified that there’s “no price that Microsoft could ever offer [Apple]” to prompt a switch to Bing because it simply doesn’t match Google’s quality.
“Google will still win and become the default search engine for the new owner, because they have all the user data,” Cross said. “That’s why I see this as a very important remedy to [lower] the barrier to entry that judge Mehta found exists to create a quality search”
