Any remedy worth the name would have required Google to delete ("disgorge," in law-speak) all that data:

pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/rev…

Some people in the antitrust world didn't see it that way. Out of a misguided kind of privacy nihilism, they called for Google to be forced to *share* the data it stole from us, so that potential competitors could tune their search tools on the monopolist's population-scale privacy violations.

And *that* is what the court has ordered.

12/

As punishment for being convinced of obtaining and maintaining a monopoly, Google will be forced to share sensitive data with *lots* of other search engines. This will not secure competition for search, but it will certainly democratize human rights violations at scale.

Doubtless there will be loopholes in this data-sharing. Google will have the right to hold back some data (*our* data) if it is deemed "sensitive." This isn't so much a loop*hole* as is a loop*chasm*.

13/

I'll bet you a testicle⹋ that Google will slap a "sensitive" label on any data that might be the least bit useful to its competitors.

⹋not one of mine

This means that even if you like data-sharing *as* a remedy, you won't actually get the benefit you were hoping for. Instead, Google competitors will spend the next decade in court, fighting to get Google to comply with this order.

14/

That's the main reason that we force monopolists to break up after they lose antitrust cases. We *could* put a bunch of conditions on how they operate, but figuring out whether they're adhering to those conditions and punishing them when they don't is expensive, labor-intensive and time consuming. This data-sharing wheeze is easy to do malicious compliance for, and hard to enforce. It is not an "administrable" policy:

locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doct…

15/

Cory Doctorow: Vertically Challenged

Science fiction has a longstanding love-hate relationship with the tech tycoon. The literature is full of billionaire inventors, sometimes painted as system-bucking heroes, at other times as megalo…

^{Locus Online}

This is *all* downside. If Google complies with the order, it will constitute a privacy breach on a scale never before seen. If they don't comply with the order, it will starve competitors of the one tiny drop of hope that Judge Mehta squeezed out of his pen. It's a catastrophe. An utter, total catastrophe. It has zero redeeming qualities. Hope you like enshittification, folks, because Judge Mehta just handed Google an eternal licence to enshittify the entire fucking internet.

16/

It's impossible to overstate how fucking *terrible* Mehta's reasoning in this decision is. The Economic Liberties project calls it "judicial cowardice" and compared the ruling to "finding someone guilty for bank robbery and then sentencing him to write a thank you note":

economicliberties.us/press-rel…

Matt Stoller says it's typical of today's "lawlessness, incoherence and deference to big business":

thebignewsletter.com/p/a-judge…

17/

DOJ & States Must Appeal Judge Mehta’s Act of Judicial Cowardice, Letting Google Keep Its Monopoly Power - DOJ & States Must Appeal Judge Mehta’s Act of Judicial Cowardice, Letting Google Keep Its Monopoly Power

Despite finding last year that Google illegally maintained a monopoly over search and search advertising, Judge Amit Mehta today declined to follow the law and terminate the monopoly.

^{Jimmy Wyderko (American Economic Liberties Project)}

David Dayen's scorching analysis in *The American Prospect* calls it "embarassing":

prospect.org/justice/2025-09-0…

Dayen points out the many ways in which Mehta ignored his own findings, ignored the Supreme Court. Mehta wrote:

> This court, however, need not decide this issue, because there are independent reasons that remedies designed to eliminate the defendant’s monopoly—i.e., structural remedies—are inappropriate in this case.

18/

Embarrassing Ruling Allows Google to Maintain Its Search Monopoly

Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of illegally monopolizing search, and then allowed the company to keep doing it.

^{David Dayen (The American Prospect)}

Which, as Dayen points out is literally a federal judge deciding to ignore the law "because reasons."

Dayen says that he doesn't see why Google would even bother appealing this ruling: "since it won on almost every point." But the DoJ *could* appeal. If MAGA's promises about holding Big Tech to account mean anything at all, the DoJ would appeal.

19/

I'll bet you a testicle⹋ that the DoJ will not appeal. After all, Trump's DoJ now has a cash register at the reception desk, and if you write a check for a million bucks to some random MAGA influencer, they can make all charges disappear:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/02/act…

⹋again, not one of mine

20/

If you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where the US won't, don't hold your breath. Commission sources leaked to Reuters the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry:

reuters.com/legal/litigation/g…

Sundar Pichai gave $1m to Donald Trump and got a seat on the dais at the inaguration. Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over. Trump is a sadist, a facist, and a rapist - and he's also a remarkably cheap date.

eof

The EU commission is a bunch of spineless cowards.

And worse: Total amateurs when it comes to tactics. You don't feed the beast, you're supposed to fight.

I thought they were professionals at politics. It's their fucking job!