Google has avoided one of the biggest penalties in its landmark antitrust case with the US Justice Department. A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the company will not have to sell its Chrome web browser, but it must make changes to how it runs its search business.
The case, led by Judge Amit Mehta, is one of the most important antitrust rulings in the tech sector in more than 25 years. Mehta found last year that Google illegally controlled the online search and AI markets. In his new ruling, Mehta blocked Google from signing exclusive search contracts and ordered the company to share limited search data with competitors, reports Bloomberg. That means rivals like Microsoft, DuckDuckGo, OpenAI, and Perplexity could get access to the data they need to build stronger search engines.
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However, the judge has not banned Google from paying third parties such as Apple to feature its search engine in default settings. The judge wrote, “Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial — in some cases, crippling — downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban.”
For Apple, this is a relief. The iPhone maker receives over $20 billion a year from Google for giving its search engine the main spot in Safari. While these payments can continue, Apple must now better promote alternative search engines and adjust its default search engine settings annually. Users must also have the option to set a different search engine for private browsing.
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Google, which argued that the government’s remedies were too extreme, called top executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, to defend its case. Judge Mehta agreed that forcing the sale of Chrome was an overreach, saying that the government “overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.”
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Meanwhile, Google is also facing another antitrust case over its advertising business, where regulators are considering whether to force the company to sell key ad tech tools.