Comparing the EU DMA to the Search-Query Data-Sharing Remedy in US v Google
The “user-side” search-query data remedy carved out by U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in the just handed-down U.S. v Google decision appears to be animated by a similar intuition (search quality depends on large volumes of click-and-query signals) as the EU Digital Markets Act’s Article 6(11), but they also diverge in important ways. Where Judge Mehta’s approach is narrower, more tethered to proven competitive harm, and deliberately cabined by process safeguards (including a cap and technical oversight), Article 6(11) DMA is ex ante, continuous, and tied into a notoriously suboptimal process managed by the European Commission.
One key problem with the DMA process is that we still don’t know how the privacy safeguards on sharing query data are meant to be interpreted, depending on how one reads “anonymised.” I set out those differences below, using the D.C. District Court’s final remedies opinion, as well as my earlier analysis and comments on the DMA compliance workshops (2024 and 2025).
I also flag a particularly telling bridge between the two regimes: the U.S. court explicitly acknowledges that DMA-style anonymization can wipe out the overwhelming majority of queries, but nonetheless appears to treat that possibility as an acceptable feature of the privacy constraint on data sharing.