Data sharing replaces divestiture as the primary remedy
Instead of a breakup, Judge Mehta imposed extensive data-sharing requirements designed to level the competitive playing field. “Google will have to make available to Qualified Competitors certain search index and user-interaction data,” the judgment stated, targeting what the court called Google’s “scale advantage” built through exclusive agreements.
The ruling requires Google to provide competitors with search index information, including web page identifiers, crawl schedules, and spam scores — data that could help rivals build more comprehensive search capabilities. Google must also syndicate search results to qualified competitors for five years, though on commercial rather than free terms.
Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, cautioned that “interoperability and data-access remedies can lower barriers, but they seldom replicate the disruptive force of a breakup.” He noted that “mandated data-sharing must be engineered with extreme care; anonymization at scale is technically fragile.”
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