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Chrome isn’t going anywhere, and neither are Google’s payments to developers of competing browsers to keep its search engine as their default.
The ruling that US District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta handed down Tuesday in the Google search-antitrust case gave the plaintiffs—the Department of Justice, joined by 49 states, the District of Columbia, and two US territories—much less than they’d asked for last year after the judge found Google had created an illegal monopoly in search.
In his 230-page opinion for the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Mehta wrote that he considered remedies for Google’s illegal conduct “with a healthy dose of humility.” He also emphasized his awareness of how AI search engines and chatbots could already be gnawing away at Google’s lock on the search market, which Statcounter data for August put at 93% in mobile and 76% on desktops in the US.
“The money flowing into this space, and how quickly it has arrived, is astonishing,” Mehta wrote of generative-AI firms. “These companies already are in a better position, both financially and technologically, to compete with Google than any traditional search company has been in decades (except perhaps Microsoft).”
That led Mehta to reject the notion of a forced sale of Chrome, which had already drawn multi-billion-dollar bids from Perplexity and other firms, as “incredibly messy and highly risky.”
He also declined the plaintiff’s request to compel a divestiture of Android in five years unless Google could prove that its ownership of that mobile platform was not hurting search competition, writing that this remedy “does not fit the wrong.”
And while the trial revealed how much Google values keeping itself as the search default in Apple’s Safari, Mehta only approved a ban on exclusivity for Google search, Google Assistant, or its Gemini AI in deals like those. (Google pays Apple in the neighborhood of $20 billion a year, plus 36% of search-ad revenue generated in Safari.) He suggested that this could allow browser developers to set a different search site as the default for private browsing.
Mehta added that banning these search-default deals would let Google keep billions of dollars a year, which it could presumably divert into search and AI improvements to widen its competitive moat, and deprive independent browser developers like Mozilla and Opera of revenue they have come to rely on.
(Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers wrote on LinkedIn that she found it “encouraging to see the Court recognize the risk of unintended consequences when trying to improve search competition — and not just for browsers like Firefox, but for the future of the open web.”)
Giving Rivals Some Search Index Crumbs
The remedies that Mehta did approve mostly address the ability of competing search engines to match Google’s comprehensive view of the web.
One will require Google to provide access to search-index data at “marginal cost” to competitors to help them create indexes of their own with the same scale as Google’s. The judge emphasized that they’re only getting a map of where to crawl: “Competitors will have to build the crawlers, crawl the web pages, extract the web page information, and process the data to create a competitive search index.”
A second remedy will offer Google alternatives a temporary boost while they build out their new indexes: syndicated Google search results, which Google will have to provide on “ordinary commercial terms” for five years.
Mehta strongly suggested that these remedies will make more of a difference if AI platforms take advantage of them, citing such expert testimony as this assessment of generative-AI platforms from Apple services chief Eddy Cue: “To me, the only thing that’s keeping them from potentially doing that is, again, growing their search index.”
The judge, however, turned down remedies that would have given more power to web publishers in their dealings with Google by banning exclusive deals between sites and Google for their content and by allowing sites to limit Google’s crawling of their sites. The first could have ensured Google could not shut out competing AI developers with deals like its AI-training exclusive with Reddit; the second would have empowered sites to allow traditional search indexing but veto the use of their data for AI Overview results.
Mehta cited a lack of evidence of harm to justify either condition (many news sites have reported falling Google search traffic), and these issues are a step removed from the search-competition subject of this case.
While Mehta rejected most of the proposed remedies about Google’s search-ads business, he did accept a requirement that it “publicly disclose material changes” to its ads auctions. This targets a pattern of stealthy price hikes revealed during the case.
“Google recognized that its price increases would be hard to explain to advertisers,” he wrote. “So, it simply did not disclose them.”
In addition, the judge declined two proposed remedies intended to raise people's awareness of their search choices: a Google-financed public-education campaign and “choice screens” that would require users to pick a search engine. Google agreed to include one in Android for EU users, but it’s made almost no difference in Google’s market share.
'A Home Run for the Status Quo'
Google responded to the ruling in a post Tuesday by Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president for regulatory affairs, that repeated earlier disagreements with the idea that it should be held liable for anticompetitive conduct when “people can easily choose the services they want.” Google continues to appeal that finding.
“Now the Court has imposed limits on how we distribute Google services, and will require us to share Search data with rivals,” the statement said. “We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and we’re reviewing the decision closely.”
The Justice Department, meanwhile, posted a statement Tuesday that said the ruling “recognizes the need for remedies that will pry open the market for general search services, which has been frozen in place for over a decade.” Abigail Slater, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said in the statement that the DOJ is also reviewing the decision: “We will continue to review the opinion to consider the Department’s options and next steps regarding seeking additional relief.”
Market-research firm MoffettNathanson offered a much pithier assessment of what it called a “slap-on-the-wrist ruling” in a note sent late Tuesday.
“This outcome is a home run for the status quo, and the status quo has been very favorable to both Google and Apple,” the note read. “We’re not suggesting that the future of search or devices is now free from competitive threat, but this decision allows the transition ahead to unfold on their terms rather than through a disruptive and damaging judgment.”