Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday, a decision in a landmark antitrust case that falls short of the sweeping changes proposed by the government to rein in the power of Silicon Valley.
Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in a 223-page ruling that to resolve Google’s monopoly in search, the company must share some of its search data with companies that are “qualified competitors.” The Justice Department had asked the judge to force the company to share even more of its data, arguing it was key to Google’s dominance.
Judge Mehta also put restrictions on payments that Google uses to ensure its search engine gets prime placement in web browsers and on smartphones. But he stopped short of banning those payments entirely and did not grant the government’s request that Google be forced to sell Chrome, which the government said was necessary to remedy the company’s power as a search monopoly.
“Notwithstanding this power, courts must approach the task of crafting remedies with a healthy dose of humility,” Judge Mehta said in Tuesday’s decision. “This court has done so.”
The decision on how to remedy a monopoly — the first of its kind in the modern internet era — is the most significant attempt to level the tech playing field since an antitrust ruling against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. Google plans to appeal, and the case is likely to be mired in the courts for years.
The conservative ruling is a blow to the government’s all-out push in recent years to challenge the dominance of the biggest tech companies. Under both the Biden and Trump administrations, the federal government accused Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta of anticompetitive behavior meant to illegally monopolize parts of the internet.
That ruling comes as generative artificial intelligence is threatening to replace traditional search engines. A.I. start-ups including OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have built humanlike chatbots that can field queries, summarize huge swaths of research and even plan a trip with step-by-step suggestions.
Google has already embedded its own A.I. answers at the top of its search results, and added a tab to its search results page where users can converse with a chatbot about their query.
Judge Mehta wrote in his ruling that the emergence of generative A.I. “changed the course of this case.”
Google’s stock price shot up about 8 percent in after-hours trading on the news to more than $229 per share.
“It’s the most important antitrust case of the 21st century,” said Bill Baer, who was an assistant attorney general for antitrust in the Obama administration. “And, of course, the battle is not over, because there will be appeals and appeals and appeals.”
Google and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Judge Mehta’s decision in the case, which is the first government monopoly lawsuit against a modern tech giant to go from filing to remedies, will set the tone as courts consider other antitrust cases accusing large tech companies of abusing their power, most prominently against Google.
In April, a federal judge in Virginia found that Google had a monopoly over some types of advertising technology, the system of software that marketers use to place advertisements on sites around the web. The government wants the court to force Google to spin off part of that system. Google says it should be required to change internal policies that entrenched its dominance. The judge in that case will consider remedies in a two-week hearing in September.
Google faces a second antitrust lawsuit over its ad tech business in Texas. This one accuses the company of maintaining its dominance at the expense of news publishers that sell ad space using its products. The case, which was brought in 2020 by a group of states, was recently delayed until after the Virginia judge decides how to proceed in that case.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, faces a ruling from a judge as soon as this fall over a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that the social media giant snuffed out its nascent competitors. An F.T.C. lawsuit against Amazon over allegations that it squeezed small merchants is scheduled to go to trial in 2027. The Justice Department has also sued Apple, saying the company makes it hard for consumers to ditch its devices.
“A well-reasoned opinion, really the first opinion involving a government challenge to a tech platform, will potentially provide some guardrails about how a court can remedy bad behavior by a monopolist in the tech sector,” Mr. Baer said.
Judge Mehta’s ruling capped a yearslong case, U.S. et al. v. Google, which the Justice Department and a group of states filed in 2020. The department said Google’s search engine, which generates billions in annual profits, conducted nearly 90 percent of web searches, a number the company disputed.
The company spends billions every year to be the built-in search engine on browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox. Google paid $26.3 billion for those deals in 2021, according to evidence presented in court.
That created a cycle that benefited Google, the government argued during a 10-week trial in 2023. The prime placement meant more people used Google, which gave it more data to make its search engine better than its competitors’. That advantage allowed it to attract more customers and further elbow out its competitors.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in a ruling last year.
This spring, both sides presented testimony and evidence to support their proposed remedies.
The government said Google should be forced to sell Chrome, share data with its rivals and stop entering into contracts that gave its search engine visible placement around the web. Google said that it should still be allowed to enter into the contracts at the heart of the case, but that companies like Apple and Samsung should have more freedom to abandon the deals or feature other search engines.
Judge Mehta said in his ruling Tuesday that he lacked expertise in the business of search engines and A.I., and that “unlike the typical case where the court’s job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts, here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future.”
“Not exactly a judge’s forte,” he added.
He barred Google from obtaining “exclusive” contracts that make its product the search engine that automatically comes up when someone opens a browser or smartphone home screen.
But he allowed Google to continue to pay for that prime placement, the behavior at the heart of the government’s case. He said that new A.I. developments meant that Google might have a harder time using its financial might to keep competitors from becoming the built-in search engines on smartphones and browsers.
“The money flowing into this space, and how quickly it has arrived, is astonishing,” he wrote. “These new realities give the court hope that Google will not simply outbid competitors for distribution if superior products emerge.”
He was similarly cautious when it came to the government’s demands that Google share its data with its rivals. He said Google needed to share its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But he said Google did not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages.
David McCabe is a Times reporter who covers the complex legal and policy issues created by the digital economy and new technologies.
The post Judge Orders Google to Share Search Results to Help Resolve Monopoly appeared first on New York Times.
