Two American technology policy experts filed a 34-page amicus brief with the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals on August 8, supporting the Justice Department’s remedies in the Google search antitrust case and arguing that generative AI cannot correct the company’s search monopoly on its own. The brief, in United States v. Google, No. 26-5023, contends that Google’s AI capabilities are financed by the profits of the very monopoly the court found unlawful, so the arrival of AI does not make the market self-correcting. Oral argument has not yet been scheduled.
The case is at a sensitive stage. In 2024, after a nine-week bench trial, Judge Amit Mehta found that Google unlawfully maintained monopolies in general search and search text advertising through exclusive distribution agreements, and in 2025 he imposed remedies that require the company to share data and syndicate search results to qualified competitors, overseen by a technical committee. The court declined, however, to ban the payments Google makes to Apple and others for default placement, the mechanism the liability opinion identified as central to the monopoly. Both sides have appealed; the Justice Department and state plaintiffs argue the remedy leaves the monopoly’s engine running, while Google argues the finding of exclusionary conduct was wrong.
The new brief enters that fight with a distinctive argument. Generative AI, its authors write, cannot be expected to “self-correct” the search monopoly, because the AI products that might compete with Google, including Google’s own Gemini models, are trained and funded using the surplus generated by the dominant search business. A rival’s AI search tool must match Google’s scale of data and compute, resources that flow from monopoly profits. The logic of the liability opinion, the brief argues, applies to AI as much as to search: the monopolist’s advantages are bought, not earned on the merits.
The brief joins a wave of outside filings in the remedy phase. The American Antitrust Institute filed on August 4, urging the court to affirm liability but strengthen the remedy by prohibiting the payment-for-default mechanism; the brief was written by AAI Vice President Kathleen Bradish and President Randy Stutz. The Open Markets Institute filed a similar brief, with policy counsel Tara Pincock arguing that “an illegal monopoly isn’t fixed if the monopolist can simply keep writing the same checks that built it.” Eight economists, legal scholars and technologists, organized through Georgetown University’s Institute for Technology Law & Policy, filed on the same day, proposing a “pay for half” framework under which Google could pay distributors but not enough to keep rivals out. Public Knowledge has also urged the court to strengthen the remedies.
The volume of filings reflects what is at stake. The district court’s remedy opinion explicitly contemplated that GenAI companies with plans to invest in search would be eligible for data-sharing and syndication, a provision that assumes AI entrants can compete if given access to the inputs Google controls. The appeals court is being asked to decide whether that assumption holds, or whether the same conduct that built the search monopoly will simply build the AI one. “The law requires remedies that reopen markets,” Pincock said, “not ones that allow monopolists to keep paying for the advantages they were found to have obtained unlawfully.”
Google’s response is that its distribution agreements are competition on the merits, that rivals have not shown they would have won default placement without the payments, and that AI has already begun to change how people search. The company has argued in filings that a remedy designed for the pre-AI world would distort the market it now operates in. The court’s treatment of that argument will shape not only the search market but the framework for AI competition: whether the new generation of digital gatekeeping is governed by antitrust rules or by the inertia of the old monopoly.
Beyond the courtroom, the brief reflects a wider argument among antitrust scholars about how to treat AI markets. Enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have opened investigations into AI partnerships, data access and compute allocation, and the Google case is emerging as a template for how judges weigh monopoly power in markets where the technology is changing fast. The D.C. Circuit’s decision, whenever it comes, will be read not only by the parties but by every startup seeking to challenge an incumbent’s control of distribution.
For now, the procedural calendar is quiet. The parties’ briefs are in, amici are piling up on both sides, and the D.C. Circuit, one of the most influential courts in the country on antitrust questions, has yet to set a date for argument. The question the judges will face is deceptively simple: did the district court correctly find a monopoly, and did it do enough to undo it? The new briefs add a third layer: whether AI, the technology everyone expects to disrupt search, will in fact disrupt the monopoly, or be absorbed by it. The experts’ answer is that the market should not be left to find out on its own.
