A federal judge has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit by consumers who claimed Google's search distribution deals with Apple and other companies blocked potential rivals from offering search engines that would have been "more privacy protective and ad-free."

U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin, sitting in the Northern District of California, issued the ruling Wednesday. In a nine-page order, she concluded that the consumers lacked evidence for their central claim.

"They submit no expert report, deposition testimony, or declaration to show that better search options could have been available to them if Google had not entered these agreements," Lin wrote.

Unless an appellate court intervenes, the order ends a legal battle that began in April 2022, when Mary Katherine Arcell and other search users filed an antitrust complaint alleging that Google monopolized search through its distribution agreements.

The case ran parallel to a much larger government effort. The U.S. Department of Justice brought similar antitrust claims against Google in 2020 — and won. In 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C. ruled that Google's distribution deals allowed the company to illegally monopolize search.

Mehta's opinion carried direct relevance to the consumers' privacy arguments. He highlighted the privacy implications of Google's monopoly, characterizing DuckDuckGo as a privacy-protective search engine that was hindered by Google's search distribution deals and by a lack of access to data. DuckDuckGo says it does not save users' IP addresses or any unique identifiers alongside searches.

Mehta also pointed to the short-lived subscription-based rival Neeva, which was unable to gain traction in the search market before shutting down.

After Mehta's ruling, Arcell and the other plaintiffs amended their complaint to include allegations that Google's search deals hindered competitors offering stronger privacy protections. That amendment kept the consumer case alive through several procedural stages.

Last year, Lin rejected Google's bid to dismiss the case at a relatively early stage. She instead allowed the plaintiffs to obtain evidence in preparation for trial. The case then moved toward a decisive test in June, when Google urged Lin to award the company summary judgment — a ruling in its favor based on witness depositions and other evidence developed for trial.

Among its arguments, Google said the plaintiffs' claims that they were injured by the distribution deals rested on "sheer speculation."

Lin subsequently directed the plaintiffs to spell out precisely how they were affected by Google's distribution arrangements. Their counsel filed a written response that called attention to Mehta's opinion in the government's antitrust case.

Lin was not persuaded. She drew a sharp distinction between Mehta's finding of structural harm to competitors and the consumers' claim of concrete harm to themselves. Mehta "found that Google's conduct erected various barriers to rivals, but expressly declined to reconstruct what would have happened absent Google's challenged conduct," Lin wrote.

"Accordingly, those findings do not address plaintiffs' theory here that high-quality search engines that were more privacy protective or ad free could have been available to them absent Google's challenged actions," she wrote.

The ruling leaves the DOJ case as the sole ongoing legal vehicle for challenging Google's search distribution agreements, and it narrows the path for private plaintiffs seeking damages tied to the same conduct.

For the search industry, the decision matters on two fronts. First, it signals that findings of monopolization in a government case do not automatically translate into viable consumer claims — plaintiffs must still prove, with evidence, that specific alternative products would have reached them. Second, it preserves the status quo for distribution economics while the remedies process in the DOJ case continues, leaving browser default placements and revenue-share deals intact for now.

Watch for a potential appeal by the Arcell plaintiffs to the Ninth Circuit, and for the remedies phase of the Justice Department's case, where the same distribution deals at the center of this dismissed suit remain under active scrutiny.