September 16, 2025

By Ian Tang and Kate Lardner, TMT Analysts

Capstone believes a federal court’s decision requiring  Alphabet Inc.’s Google to share the index that powers its search engine with search engine rivals and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) companies will create tailwinds for non-traditional third-party data brokers and alternative data providers, which will gain access to significantly enriched data through partnerships with qualified competitors.  

• US District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta’s September remedy ruling in US v. Google (Search case) will require Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google to provide qualified competitors with access to certain aspects of its Search Index and user interaction data, among several other remedies that Capstone will discuss in upcoming notes. The definition of qualified competitors in the final judgment will likely extend to firms that the court said are “functional equivalents” to general search services market participants, including GenAI players.  

• Google has rarely granted external access to its Search Index or automated access to its search results. Therefore, Capstone believes Judge Mehta’s data-sharing remedy will give rival search engines and GenAI companies new, albeit limited, pathways to access previously inaccessible data, improving the quality of their datasets, and temporarily boosting their access to scale. In turn, these firms will be able to sell improved data to third parties. 

• The data-sharing remedy, if implemented, will present opportunity for non-traditional data brokers, which typically rely on their own scraping efforts to collect and repackage data, to significantly expand the universe of data available to them.  We expect these firms to benefit through indirect access to Google’s Application Programming Interface (API), an intermediary that enables communication between software applications, through partnerships with qualified competitors. 

Judge Mehta’s Ruling 

US District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta on September 2^nd filed a ruling deciding remedies in the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust case against Google. Judge Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google held a monopoly in the general search services and search text advertising markets. His remedies decision, which adopts Google’s proposed final judgment with modifications, follows a middle-ground approach that primarily focuses on two core pillars: exclusive contracts and data-sharing. 

Data – Sharing

The data-sharing remedy requires Google to provide qualified competitors with access at marginal cost to 1) its Search Index, an organized database containing information about web pages that allows Google to quickly retrieve results to user queries; and 2) its user interaction data, such as data related to user behavior and trends in search queries. However, Judge Mehta narrowed the data Google must share to ensure that the remedy was “tailored to fit the wrong.” 

Exhibit 1: Aspects of DOJ Proposed Data-Sharing Remedies Included/Excluded in Opinion  

Data Type	Included in Remedy	Not Included in Remedy	Disclosure Frequency
Search Index	Document IDs: identifiers for each document in the Search Index  URL map: dataset mapping relationship among URLs   First/last crawl time stamps: number of times a URL is seen  Spam score: Filtering out low-quality web pages   Device-type flagging: identifying user device type	Popularity/quality measures: engagement metrics   Proprietary ranking technology: how Google weighs its results  Knowledge Graph: structured database of facts about people, places	One-time snapshot
User-side	Glue data: collection of data about a query and the user’s interaction with it   RankEmbed data: subset of search ranking signals	GenAI training data: data used to train GenAI models in Search	Multiple disclosures

Source: Judge Mehta’s memorandum opinion 

Qualified Competitors

Capstone believes the final judgment will extend the remedies beyond rival search engines and to firms that are “functional equivalents” to general search services market participants, including GenAI players. Although Judge Mehta initially was skeptical during trial that he could include AI players in the market definition since they were distinct from the relevant market considered during the liability phase, he cited New York v. Microsoft Corp. in his ruling, a case in which the court found that “new technologies” could be included in the remedies because they “had the capacity to function in a manager similar to that” of the products in the original “middleware” market (i.e., Netscape, Java) in question during the liability ruling. Judge Mehta applied the same judicial precedent to the Search case as GenAI can be used in many ways similar to a general search engine, the remedies should extend to those players. 

While he stopped short of formally expanding the market definition, Judge Mehta broadened the scope of qualified competitors from companies competing in the general search engine or search text ads markets to companies competing with those markets. Through this small language revision, Mehta expanded potential data-sharing recipients significantly, allowing GenAI players and other companies deemed similar to general search services participants to benefit from the remedies in addition to Google’s rival search engines and create better search products.  

Investment Implications

Capstone believes Judge Mehta’s data sharing remedy and expanded definition of qualified competitors will benefit rival search engines GenAI players and other “functional equivalents” to general search services participants through access to premium Google data. In turn, these companies will be able to sell improved datasets to third parties. This presents an investment opportunity in non-traditional data brokers that will partner with these qualified competitors to gain access to Google’s API indirectly. Conceivably, the parties could adjust the data sharing mechanism required in the final judgment and Google could distribute its Search Index without using an API, but regardless, Qualified Competitors will receive Google data and have to make it available to their third-party business customers via an API.  

While most of Google’s search rivals make money by selling advertising, selling data and API access is another revenue stream for both search engines and GenAI companies. Judge Mehta’s data sharing remedy will give these companies the ability to build richer datasets, which they will be more likely to sell to third parties. Non-traditional third-party data brokers rely on their own scraping efforts, one-off sourcing transactions, and manual collection. Access to Google’s Search Index through a qualified competitor, even in a one-time snapshot, will significantly expand the universe of data available to them.   

As direct recipients of Google’s data, independent search engine operators also will see an opportunity because access to previously exclusive data and infrastructure, even on a one-time basis, will lower their barriers to entry. Additionally, during the remedies trial, witnesses testified that while access to Search Index data would be impactful for competitors, it would be significantly strengthened by user interaction data, or “click and query” data. Companies deemed qualified competitors by the court and the Technical Committee will have an opportunity to improve their responses to user queries and establish themselves as more credible search engine alternatives, although building comparable search products will likely take time and significant resources.  

What’s Next

DOJ and Google will meet and confer and submit a joint revised final judgment in line with the court’s findings by September 17^th. After that, the court-appointed Technical Committee will begin its work, including identifying the qualified competitors. The remedies will take effect 60 days after the final judgment is entered and remain in place for the next six years. However, Google has indicated that it will appeal the original liability decision to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which will likely include a request to further delay Judge Mehta’s remedies. We believe the appellate court is likely to allow that while the appeals proceedings play out, which could take up to a year. 

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Read more from Capstone’s TMT team:
Challenging the Giants: Big Tech’s Growing Antitrust Battles in Court
Charting AI’s Course: Identifying the Accelerators and Roadblocks Ahead
Firewall Frenzy: Cyber Vendors Benefit Amid Rising Global Tensions