When a federal judge concluded a year ago that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, it offered the chance to change the way we use smartphones, computers and the internet as a whole.
To fix the monopoly, the judge could have forced Google to correct its behavior and open up competition. For consumers, that meant that instead of using Google.com, we might have gained more choices of search engines and could visit a different site to search the web. Google could also have been forced to sell its Chrome web browser and Android operating system, potentially transforming the experience of the mobile web and apps.
On Tuesday, it became clear that none of that would happen. Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in his decision to fix the monopoly that Google would have to share some search data, but he did not require it to sell Chrome or Android.
“It’s a nothingburger,” said Gabriel Weinberg, the chief executive of DuckDuckGo, a search engine start-up that testified against Google in the antitrust case.
Here’s what this all means for you.
Will we see any changes to rival search engines?
Under Judge Mehta’s decision, Google is required to share only some of its search data. That includes a list of the websites that its search engine crawls to generate results but not the secret sauce that makes Google.com tick.
That means search engines from rivals like DuckDuckGo, Microsoft and others are unlikely to substantially improve. And because Google is appealing Judge Mehta’s decision, any changes would most likely take years to materialize.
Will Google.com still be the search engine we see on iPhones?
Probably. Google has paid Apple about $20 billion annually to handle search queries on iPhones, meaning Google.com was the default search engine that we saw on the device.
In his ruling, Judge Mehta allowed Google to continue paying companies like Apple and Samsung for prime placement of its search engine on their devices. Apple has also argued that it chose to feature Google.com by default in its Safari web browser because Google had the best search results, so this will probably remain unchanged.
Will A.I. chatbots benefit from the ruling?
A.I. chatbots such as Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which partly rely on data from search engines to generate their answers, probably won’t get much of a boost from Judge Mehta’s decision, either. The more complicated parts of search technology, including how Google.com ranks websites, are not part of the legal remedy.
Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.
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