Give DuckDuckGo (DDG) credit for its spirit. After 15 years of trying, the search engine ranks fifth globally. But it has, stagnated and even DDG admits it isn’t on par with Google. Now, rather than innovating to surpass its competitors, DDG is asking the government to force Google to hand over the secret sauce that made Google the market leader. Imagine telling Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce they must play for both the Kansas City Chiefs and their opponents each week. That’s not how competition works—neither on the football field nor in business.

When DDG launched in 2008, it took a smart approach: Instead of directly mimicking Google, it created a privacy-focused alternative with fewer ads. To economize, DDG chose to syndicate its results from Microsoft’s Bing rather than build its own engine. The strategy paid off. DDG amassed millions of users and raised over $100 million from investors. Its market share steadily grew for over a decade.

But here’s the catch: DDG’s strategy comes with trade-offs. More privacy means less data and fewer ads means less revenue, both of which hamper DDG’s ability to improve. By 2022, DDG’s growth began to stall. Its dependence on Bing is a reputational burden—Apple reportedly dismissed DDG as merely a “veneer on top of other search engines.”

Now, DDG is eyeing a shortcut. With the Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust case against Google heading toward its remedy phase, DDG sees a chance to grab what it couldn’t build on its own. It wants the government to force Google to provide DDG complete, real-time access to every Google search. With this trove of information, DDG could learn to imitate Google without doing the heavy lifting itself.

Letting DDG do this would hurt not just Google, but competition and innovation in the broader market.

In the antitrust case, US District Judge Amit P. Mehta acknowledged Google’s search engine as “the industry’s highest quality” and praised it for earning the trust of millions of users through innovation. He noted that Google’s quality is “miraculous,” that the company earned its success, and that rivals are far behind. No wonder DDG wants what Google has built.

Judge Mehta said Google’s only illegal act was writing long-term contracts with companies like Apple, which make Google their default search engine. These contracts were legal except for their duration, which ranged from two to five years. He suggested that shorter contracts might have given competitors like Bing, Yahoo, and DDG more breathing room.

As the court now turns to remedies, DDG is proposing a radical solution: force Google to hand over its search results in real time, while also preventing Google from being the default search engine in its own Chrome browser and Android operating system. This is akin to telling the Chiefs they can’t build their offense around their star players—a notion that defies logic and fairness. Far from leveling the playing field, this would undermine competition by punishing the market leader for its success.

DDG argues that Google’s success stems from illegally obtained “distribution” and “scale” advantages. But this narrative doesn’t hold up under scrutiny—Google was already the market leader before it entered these multi-year contracts. The contracts, which effectively began around 2007, had only a modest impact on Google’s share of desktop searches, boosting it by just nine percent over the next eight years before falling back to its 2008 level. On mobile, the story is much the same: Google’s share has remained stable. Moreover, DDG’s own growth and fundraising success occurred while these contracts were in force. And DDG’s recent stagnation coincides with a decline in Google’s desktop market share globally. Google is not DDG’s problem.

What DDG wants isn’t a fairer marketplace, but to ride on the x-factor that Google built through years of investment and effort. That’s not how real competition works. If the government wants to address whatever advantages Google might have gained through long contracts, the solution is to shorten contracts, not give rivals assets they did not earn. Forcing Google to hand over its search data won’t lead to better products or more competition.

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