Judge bars Google from exclusive search deals but says it can keep Chrome
A federal judge Tuesday ordered Google to halt its multibillion-dollar exclusivity contracts to promote its search engine and share some data with competitors to resolve a high-profile monopoly case, but he rejected the Justice Department’s request to break up the company.
The ruling means Google has averted its worst-case scenario of a breakup. While the company can still make payments to device manufacturers to preload Google Search, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said Tuesday the company can no longer require exclusivity.
Mehta also ordered Google to share certain search index data with some of its rivals, but he turned down the Justice Department’s request that the company present users with a “choice screen” to make it easier for them to pick a different search engine.
Despite Google’s economic power, Mehta wrote, “courts must approach the task of crafting remedies with a healthy dose of humility. This court has done so.”
Mehta’s restrained ruling was a marked setback to government efforts to aggressively rein in the giants of Silicon Valley. Google’s stock jumped more than 7 percent in after-hours trading.
The Google search monopoly case has been closely watched as the first of multiple antitrust rulings awaiting Big Tech firms. The Justice Department also has filed a monopoly lawsuit against Apple, and the Federal Trade Commission has challenged allegedly anticompetitive behavior at Meta and Amazon.
The rapid advances in AI have loomed over the case. The U.S. government argued that heavier restraints on Google are necessary to prevent it from extending its monopoly power to AI, while the company said it faces a stiff rivalry from new AI applications such as ChatGPT.
The judge’s prohibition on exclusivity deals extends to Google’s Gemini AI assistant. Mehta wrote that he had considered the risk of the internet giant leveraging its search monopoly to gain unfair advantage in the emerging AI sector, even as it brings an influx of fresh competition.
“The emergence of GenAI [generative AI] changed the course of this case,” Mehta wrote. “For the first time in over a decade, there is a genuine prospect that a product could emerge that will present a meaningful challenge to Google’s market dominance.”
Google issued a brief statement in a blog post Tuesday that also referenced the AI boom. “Today’s decision recognizes how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information. This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want,” Google head of regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland wrote.
Mulholland added that the company has “concerns” about the requirements to share search data with rivals and that they were reviewing the decision. Google is still appealing the original decision that found it was an illegal monopoly.
Mehta ordered the remedies to be in place for six years, splitting the difference between Google’s request of three years and the Justice Department’s request for 10 years. He told the two sides to meet and submit a revised final judgment consistent with his opinion by Sept. 10.
Abigail Slater, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said in a post on X that her team is weighing its options as it considers whether the judge’s orders go far enough. “Markets should be free, not manipulated or regulated by digital tyrants. This is the American way,” she wrote. “President Trump directed us to Make America Competitive Again, and that’s what we are doing.”
Tuesday’s order followed a landmark ruling in August 2024, when Mehta determined that Google’s online search business was an illegal monopoly. Hearings on what changes Google should be required to make to restore open competition to the sector took place in the spring, with prosecutors calling for breaking up the company through the forced divestiture of Google’s Chrome browser.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who led 38 state attorneys general in a companion lawsuit, said he was confident that Google would lose its appeal. “We are appreciative of the remedies that have been imposed,” he said, “and we are studying the details of the Court’s remedies carefully.”
Sam Weinstein, a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer, said Mehta’s opinion was in line with judges’ traditional wariness of ordering the breakup of companies, especially when they have grown organically. “Courts are very reluctant to order divestitures” in these kinds of antitrust cases, Weinstein said.
Mehta wrote that the Justice Department had not met the heavy burden of proving that a “radical structural” remedy—such as the divestiture of Chrome or Android—was necessary to restore competition in the search engine market. The last major company ordered to split up under Section 2 of the Sherman Act was AT&T in 1984.
“Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divestiture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints,” Mehta wrote.
Mehta’s decision not to break up Google was welcomed by industry voices on Tuesday, while some antitrust advocates expressed disappointment.
Matt Schruers, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said in a statement that the court had “rightly” rejected the breakup proposal, which he said would have “harmed competition and consumers.”
Gene Kimmelman, who served as an adviser for the Justice Department under President Joe Biden, called it a “disappointingly weak remedy which likely leaves Google well positioned to continue to dominate the online search market and grow more powerful in the exploding market for artificial intelligence.”
Mehta ordered Google to share certain search index and user-interaction data with some of its rivals, but he turned down the Justice Department’s request for the company to also have to share granular data with advertisers. He also declined to require the company to pay for a national public education campaign on search engine options and how to switch them, something the Justice Department had requested.
The case was filed in 2020 by the Justice Department during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, then taken to court in September 2023 during Biden’s term.
Meanwhile, another federal court in Alexandria ruled in April that Google’s advertising technology unit has operated as an illegal monopoly, in a separate case filed by the Justice Department. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia will hold hearings this fall on what remedies to impose on Google to resolve that case.
Since Trump’s return to the White House, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other executives have sought to convince the new administration that tech companies need a lighter regulatory touch to ensure they can come out ahead in a technological race against China. Critics of the tech sector have countered that the companies are playing up the “China threat” to try to avoid antitrust enforcement.
During the search remedies trial this spring, the Justice Department asked Mehta to require Google to make a range of changes, including divesting its popular Chrome web browser, ending exclusive distribution agreements with Apple and other phone makers, and sharing data from its search engine with rival companies.
Google said such measures would cripple its capability to innovate and argued that lesser measures, such as loosening the terms of its agreements with device and browser makers, would be enough to spur competition in the search market.
Gerrit De Vynck contributed to this report.
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