As the appeal in the United States v. Google search antitrust case moves forward, attention has shifted to whether the remedies ordered by US District Court Judge Amit Mehta will effectively address Google’s illegal monopoly in general search. At the heart of that monopoly are Google’s multi-billion-dollar payments to distribution partners – Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, and others – to lock in Google search as the default on nearly every mobile device and across much of the desktop browser market. Yet despite identifying these payments as the central anticompetitive conduct, Judge Mehta declined to ban them in his remedy opinion issued in September 2025. Concerned about windfall profits to Google, harm to channel partners, and consumer disruption, he allowed Google to continue paying for default placement subject only to minimal restrictions.
The result, by the court’s own acknowledgment, is a remedy that may leave in place the very forces that have made the search ecosystem exceptionally resistant to change. Liability has been established, but the conduct that produced it can continue largely unchecked.
The case is now on appeal, and the judge’s remedy opinion already contemplates the possibility of revisiting the idea of a payment ban. To meet that moment when it comes, leading economists and competition experts have come together to propose a targeted adjustment to the remedy, Pay for Half: A Better Remedy for Google Search.
Rather than ban Google’s default-placement payments outright, Pay for Half shows how the court can reasonably cap them. Pay for Half proposes up to a 50% market share cap, which would allow Google to make payments to distribution partners on no more than half of the devices within any product line. This remedy is designed to open meaningful opportunities for competing search providers while preserving search-based revenue streams for distribution partners.
Pay for Half involves three components:
- Market share cap: Limit the proportion of devices for which Google can share search revenue to no more than 50% of the devices within any of a distribution partner’s product lines, ensuring that competing search providers have immediate access to a meaningful share of the market.
- Payment cap: Limit the total search revenue Google can pay per device to prevent it from increasing its payments or other forms of compensation to undermine the remedy. We suggest a 40% payment cap to start, which can be reduced over time if competition does not emerge.
- Random assignment: Require that any share of a product line for which Google does enter a contract for payments be assigned randomly to devices within that product line, preventing Google from concentrating payments on devices that generate the highest per-device search revenue.
In all, Pay for Half creates an immediate distribution channel for competitors, including emerging AI-powered entrants, and it responds to the concerns Judge Mehta raised: distribution partners retain meaningful payments, device manufacturers design the user experience for their customers, and Google itself continues to compete for distribution. But it does so while the remedy opens at least half of the market to rivals on day one. As the case moves through the appeals process, Pay for Half provides an implementable framework to help restore competition in search and create opportunities for search rivals in an evolving technology landscape.
