A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a shake-up of Google’s search engine in a crackdown aimed at curbing the corrosive power of an illegal monopoly while rebuffing the U.S. government’s attempt to break up the company and impose other restraints.
The 226-page decision made by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., will likely ripple across the technological landscape at a time when the industry is being reshaped by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence — including conversational “answer engines” as companies like ChatGPT and Perplexity try to upend Google’s long-held position as the internet’s main gateway.
The innovations and competition being unleashed by generative artificial intelligence, or “GenAI,” have reshaped the judge’s approach to remedies in the nearly five-year-old antitrust case.
“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,” Mehta wrote.
Investors seemed to interpret the ruling as a relatively light slap on the wrist for Google, as the stock price of its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., surged nearly 3% in extended trading.
The judge is trying to rein in Google by prohibiting some of the tactics the company deployed to drive traffic to its search engine and other services.
But Mehta stopped short of banning the multi-billion dollar deals that Google has been making for years to lock in its search engine as the default on smartphones, personal computers and other devices. Those deals, involving payments of more than $26 billion annually, were one of the main issues that prompted the judge to conclude Google’s search engine was an illegal monopoly, but he decided banning them in the future would do more harm than good.
Partially because he is allowing the default deals to continue, Mehta is ordering Google to give its current and would-be rivals access to some of its search engine’s secret sauce — the data stockpiled from trillions of queries that it used to help improve the quality of its search results.
The judge also rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s effort to force Google to sell its popular Chrome browser, concluding it was an unwarranted step that “would be incredibly messy and highly risky.”
“Now the Court has imposed limits on how we distribute Google services, and will require us to share Search data with rivals,” Google said in a statement provided to CBS News following the ruling. “We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and we’re reviewing the decision closely. The Court did recognize that divesting Chrome and Android would have gone beyond the case’s focus on search distribution, and would have harmed consumers and our partners.”
“We proved in court that competition had been frozen in place for two decades in internet search,” Abigail Slater, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, wrote in a social media post. “Google’s tactics have excluded competition, harming consumers and slowing innovation. Today’s remedy order agreed with the need to restore competition to the long-monopolized search market, and we are now weighing our options and thinking through whether the ordered relief goes far enough in serving that goal.”
Allowing the default search deals to continue is more than just a victory for Google. It’s also something that Apple, which receives more than $20 billion annually from Google, and the beneficiaries of the payments urged Mehta to maintain.
In hearings earlier this year, Apple warned the judge that banning the contracts would deprive the company of money that it funnels into its own innovative research. The Cupertino, California, company also cautioned that the ban could have the unintended consequence of making Google even more powerful by pocketing the money it had been spending on deals while most consumers will still end up flocking to Google’s search engine anyway.
Others, such as the owners of the Firefox search engine, asserted that losing the Google contracts would threaten their future survival by depriving them of essential revenue.
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