Alphabet-owned Google on Friday asked a judge to postpone the company’s obligation to share data with rivals while it challenges a ruling that it holds an illegal monopoly on online searches, according to court documents.
Washington District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in 2024 that the company used illegal tactics to maintain its dominance in online searches. Google said in court documents Friday that it will ask a federal appeals court to overturn that ruling.
Mehta went too far in his attempt to level the playing field by ordering it to share its data with competitors, including generative artificial intelligence companies like ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Google said.
Google said that if it follows the order, it risks revealing trade secrets with no chance of recovering them if it wins its appeal, and asked Mehta to suspend that part of his sentence.
Google did not ask to defer other requirements, such as limiting contracts that allow it to preload applications, including its Gemini AI chatbot, to one year.
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“While Google believes these measures are unjustified and should never have been imposed, it is willing to do anything short of turning over its data or providing syndicated results and ads while its appeal is pending,” the company said.
Despite being found guilty of multiple illegal monopolies, Google has emerged virtually unscathed from its long battle against US antitrust authorities.
The United States Department of Justice and the coalition of states that brought the case have until February 3 to decide whether to appeal Mehta’s ruling that rejects more forceful measures. Antitrust authorities wanted Google to sell its Chrome browser and end billions of dollars in payments to Apple and other companies that agree to preselect Google as the default search engine on new devices.
With information from Reuters
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