The results are in: Google has an illegal search monopoly, and now it’s going to pay the price. Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling in the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google was a victory for the Trump administration, and specifically the antitrust division under Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater.

When the Justice Department filed its antitrust case in the first Trump administration, expectations were sky-high. Advocates of stronger competition enforcement hoped for a sweeping ruling that would take strong action against Google and reset the political calculus on corporate power. While the court’s recent decision does not adopt every remedy the DOJ sought, it represents an important step forward in the broader antitrust enforcement landscape going forward.

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That said, the weaknesses of the ruling deserve frank acknowledgment. On several points, the court hesitated to impose the full scope of remedies the DOJ requested, including the divestiture of Chrome or Android, and even seemed to allow Google to continue paying companies to preload its search platform on other browsers, which was a key factor in the formation of its illegal monopoly in the first place. On those points, the Justice Department should consider appealing the ruling — because Google will not.

And yet, despite these shortcomings, it would be a mistake to dismiss the decision as hollow.

The court gave the DOJ some meaningful wins. Most importantly, it banned Google from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts for Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and Gemini. That prohibition extends to tying Play Store licensing to Google services and conditioning revenue-sharing on exclusive placement. It also required that any such agreements be capped at one year, preventing Google from locking up distribution channels for a decade at a time. The court also ordered Google to share certain search index and user-interaction data with “Qualified Competitors.” This is significant for search competitors. Many platforms struggle with the ability to scale, and this will allow companies to build better, more innovative search products.

Critics will say the ruling doesn’t go far enough — and they’re right. But the significance of this case lies less in what the court denied than in what it accepted. For the first time in decades, a federal court imposed broad, forward-looking remedies on a dominant tech platform. The ban on exclusivity, the one-year contract cap, the data-sharing mandate, and the oversight committee collectively represent a check on Google’s power.

Equally important, the court recognized that remedies must address not only search, but also generative AI, where Google’s Gemini app is poised to replay the same exclusionary playbook. By explicitly including AI products in its order, the court signaled that it will not wait until a new monopoly is fully entrenched before acting. That is a crucial precedent.

Even a partial victory signals that courts are willing to scrutinize concentrated power more seriously than they have in decades. That shift, however incremental, should be welcomed.

This ruling should be seen as the beginning, not the end, of modern antitrust enforcement. The DOJ didn’t get its full suite of remedies, many of which were pursued under the Biden administration, but it forced open the door. Future cases will be able to point to this decision as proof that courts can and will impose meaningful restrictions on tech giants.

The lesson here is twofold. The first is that antitrust enforcement is possible, even against the largest and most well-funded legal teams in the world. The second is that progress will be incremental. The courts are cautious institutions, and judges will rarely leap to break up firms. And this is where Congress needs to step in. But in the meantime, and by securing behavioral restrictions, data access, and oversight, the DOJ has given would-be innovators new tools to succeed.

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For too long, antitrust law has been caricatured as a dead letter. This ruling proves such caricatures wrong. The government should keep pressing. There are three more antitrust cases to finish up: the Google adtech case, Apple smartphone monopoly case, and Live Nation case, not counting United States et al. v. Google, the search trial, which the DOJ may well seek additional remedies.

All of these cases are opportunities to build on the America First antitrust foundation set by the first Trump administration. Alone, the remedies these cases provide may not revolutionize search overnight or break up Big Tech directly, but they do something vital: They restore the principle that no company, not even Google, is above the law.

Aiden Buzzetti is the president of the Bull Moose Project.