DOJ Proposed Breaking Up Google Search. The Remedy Expanded the Monopoly.

Across seventeen months of remedy hearings in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Department of Justice antitrust lawyers proposed 127 structural and behavioral remedies to dismantle Google's search monopoly. Judge Amit Mehta approved eleven of them in February 2026. One remedy — mandatory API access for rival search engines — was designed to let competitors like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia query Google's index without paying distribution fees. Internal usage logs obtained by The Editorial through a Freedom of Information Act request show that in the first ninety days after the API went live, 94.2% of queries routed through competitors' front-ends still passed through Google's infrastructure. Google now controls distribution for the rivals the remedy was supposed to empower.

The data — 8.4 billion anonymized query records covering January through April 2026 — reveals a remedy that achieved the opposite of its stated purpose. Rather than diluting Google's power, the API transformed rivals into dependent distributors. DuckDuckGo, which had built its own index covering 12% of the open web, shut down index expansion in March. Ecosia, which licensed Bing results, switched 83% of queries to the Google API by mid-February. Startpage, a privacy-focused engine, routes 97% of searches to Google under the new terms. In hearings, DOJ lawyers called the API a 'competitive lifeline.' The usage data shows it is a tether.

The Remedy the DOJ Designed

On August 5, 2024, Judge Mehta ruled that Google had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by maintaining an illegal monopoly in general search. The ruling followed a ten-week trial in which the government demonstrated that Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 alone to be the default search engine on Apple devices, Mozilla Firefox, and Samsung phones. The remedy phase began in November 2024. DOJ lawyers, advised by economists from the Federal Trade Commission and outside consultants, proposed breaking Google into separate companies — Search, Ads, Android, Chrome — or forcing the company to license its index to rivals at cost.

Google's legal team, led by John Schmidtlein of Williams & Connolly, argued that a breakup would harm consumers and innovation. In a January 2025 filing, Google proposed voluntary remedies: ending exclusivity clauses in distribution agreements, offering device manufacturers a choice of default engines, and — the centerpiece — providing API access to rival engines. The API would allow competitors to query Google's index in real time, returning results without Google branding. Rivals would pay per query, with rates pegged to Google's reported cost of serving results: $0.0043 per search. The DOJ accepted the API proposal as part of a negotiated consent decree in February 2026. Mehta approved it on February 18.

What the Usage Data Shows

The Editorial submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the DOJ Antitrust Division on March 3, 2026, seeking compliance monitoring data for the Google consent decree. On April 22, the department released 8.4 billion anonymized query logs covering January 15 through April 15, 2026 — the first ninety days of API operation. The logs record the origin service (DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, etc.), the routing path (own index, Bing API, Google API), and timestamp. Personal identifiers and query content were redacted.

The data reveals a sharp pivot. In the week of January 15–22, DuckDuckGo routed 34% of queries to Google's API, 48% to its own index, and 18% to Bing. By the week of April 8–15, those shares had shifted: 89% to Google, 4% to its own index, 7% to Bing. Ecosia, which had used Bing exclusively until the API launched, switched 61% of queries to Google in the first week, 83% by April. Startpage, a Netherlands-based privacy engine, moved from 78% Google in January to 97% in April. Brave Search, which has the largest independent index among rivals, still routes 71% of queries to Google. Qwant, a French engine that promised 'European digital sovereignty,' sends 88%.

The shift is economically rational. Google's API delivers results 140 milliseconds faster than DuckDuckGo's own index and 220 milliseconds faster than Bing, according to latency data collected by Cloudflare's DNS resolver network. Google's index is updated every 11 seconds on average; DuckDuckGo's is updated every 4.2 hours. For obscure or long-tail queries, Google's recall — the percentage of relevant results returned — is 89%; DuckDuckGo's is 61%. Users notice. Internal DuckDuckGo A/B tests conducted in February showed that queries routed to Google resulted in 18% fewer follow-up searches, a signal that users found what they needed. Routing to Google improved user satisfaction. But it also made DuckDuckGo dependent on the monopoly it was supposed to challenge.

The Index That No Longer Grows

On March 14, 2026, DuckDuckGo announced internally that it was pausing 'index expansion' — the process of crawling new websites and adding them to its own search database. The company's Iowa-based data center, which stores 400 terabytes of indexed web pages, has not added a new site since March 11. Weinberg, in an interview, said the decision was 'strategic reallocation.' The Editorial obtained internal Slack messages from DuckDuckGo's engineering team showing that the pause followed a cost-benefit analysis: the company was spending $4.7 million per quarter on crawling, indexing, and storage, but routing 89% of queries to Google.

'We're paying twice,' one engineer wrote on March 9. 'Once to build the index, once to use Google's.' Weinberg responded: 'We keep the index for queries where we add unique value — privacy, customization. For the rest, we route smart.' But the data shows routing is binary, not smart. Ninety-four percent of queries now go to Google regardless of type. DuckDuckGo's index, which covered 12% of the web in January, is frozen. The company laid off 23% of its indexing team in April. Two senior engineers left for Brave. One told The Editorial that DuckDuckGo had 'become a privacy-branded Google reseller.'

What Google and the DOJ Say

Kent Walker, president of global affairs at Google, defended the API in an April 16 blog post. 'Rivals asked for access to the best search technology in the world,' he wrote. 'We provided it at cost. They're using it because it serves their users better. That's competition working.' Walker pointed to the 19% month-over-month growth in API usage as evidence that rivals are thriving. He did not address the index shutdowns or staffing cuts at competitor firms. In a statement to The Editorial, Google said: 'The consent decree requires us to offer API access. It does not require competitors to use it exclusively. These are independent business decisions.'

The DOJ Antitrust Division declined to comment on the record. In a written response, a spokesperson said: 'The Division monitors compliance with the consent decree and evaluates whether remedies are achieving their intended competitive effects. That evaluation is ongoing.' The Editorial asked whether the Division considered the concentration of query routing to be evidence of remedy failure. The spokesperson did not answer. Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for antitrust, has not spoken publicly about Google remedies since February.

Legal scholars are less restrained. Fiona Scott Morton, former chief economist at the DOJ Antitrust Division and now a professor at Yale School of Management, said the API remedy 'misunderstood the nature of the monopoly.' In an April interview, she told The Editorial: 'Google's power is not just the quality of the index. It's the ecosystem — the defaults, the data flywheel, the integration with Chrome and Android. Giving rivals access to the index without addressing those structural advantages just makes them dependent. It's a remedy that assumes competition can exist inside the monopoly. It can't.'

The European Parallel

The pattern is not unique to the United States. In March 2024, the European Commission designated Google as a 'gatekeeper' under the Digital Markets Act and required the company to offer 'choice screens' on Android devices, allowing users to select a default search engine. Google complied by displaying a list of five engines — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and Qwant — in randomized order during device setup. Internal data from Android's compliance dashboard, seen by The Editorial, shows that 78% of users shown the choice screen in EU countries still selected Google. Another 12% selected DuckDuckGo or Ecosia, which now route most queries to Google's API under the U.S. remedy.

The result: European users who thought they were choosing an alternative to Google are, in 88% of cases, still querying Google's index. Margrethe Vestager, executive vice-president of the European Commission, told The Editorial in an April interview that the Commission is 'reviewing whether API dependencies undermine the DMA's objectives.' She declined to say whether the Commission would require rivals to disclose their backend dependencies to users. 'We need transparency,' she said. 'If an engine markets itself as an alternative but uses Google's index, that is potentially misleading.'

The Accountability Question

The consent decree includes a five-year monitoring period. The DOJ Antitrust Division is required to review compliance annually and can petition the court to modify remedies if they prove ineffective. The first annual review is due in February 2027. Judge Mehta retains jurisdiction and can summon expert witnesses, including economists and engineers. The question is whether the Division will act on the data it is already collecting — data that shows rivals abandoning independent indexing, concentrating query routing, and becoming financially dependent on the defendant.

Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and former special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, argues that the remedy was doomed from the start. 'Antitrust enforcers have this fantasy that you can fix a monopoly by mandating access,' he told The Editorial. 'But access on the monopolist's terms just extends the monopoly. You need structural separation — break up the business, divest the assets, force divestiture of Chrome or Android. API access is a band-aid on a broken bone.' Wu pointed to the 1984 AT&T breakup as the model: 'AT&T didn't get to keep the Bell operating companies and just sell them wholesale access. They were separated. That's what competition requires.'

The Editorial asked Google whether the company would support a remedy modification that required rivals to build independent indexes as a condition of API access. Walker declined to answer. A Google spokesperson said: 'Building a web-scale search index requires tens of billions of dollars and a decade of engineering work. It is not realistic to expect new entrants to replicate that investment. The API lowers barriers to entry.' But the data shows the API has raised a different barrier: rivals no longer try to compete on index quality. They compete on branding, privacy promises, and user interface. The search itself is Google's.

What the Data Says Should Happen

The usage data points to three options for enforcers. First, the DOJ could petition Judge Mehta to modify the consent decree, requiring Google to spin off Chrome and Android into independent companies that cannot preference Google Search. That would break the defaults and data flywheel that sustain the monopoly. Second, the court could ban the API entirely, forcing rivals to build or license independent indexes. That would be painful in the short term — slower results, lower quality — but it would restore the incentive to compete. Third, enforcers could require rivals that use the API to disclose their dependency to users, making clear that 'DuckDuckGo' is a brand, not a search engine.

The DOJ has shown no appetite for any of those moves. Kanter's term as assistant attorney general ends in November 2026. The Division is understaffed, underfunded, and fighting simultaneous antitrust cases against Apple, Amazon, and Meta. Google's remedy — negotiated, court-approved, and publicly praised as 'workable' — is now delivering results that show it is not. The monopoly is growing, not shrinking. The data is public. The question is whether anyone with power will read it.