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Lauren Feiner
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Google will not have to sell its Chrome browser in order to address its illegal monopoly in online search, DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Tuesday. Over a year ago, Judge Mehta found that the search giant had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act; his ruling now determines what Google must do in response.
Mehta declined to grant some of the more ambitious proposals from the Justice Department to remedy Google’s behavior and restore competition to the market. Besides letting Google keep Chrome, he’ll also let the company continue to pay distribution partners for preloading or placement of its search or AI products. But he did order Google to share some valuable search information with rivals that could help jumpstart their ability to compete, and bar the search giant from making exclusive deals to distribute its search or AI assistant products in ways that might cut off distribution for rivals.
It’s the most significant antitrust remedies ruling against a tech giant in about 25 years, since the DOJ’s case against Microsoft. While it marks a major milestone in the case, it could still be years until Google is actually required to implement these solutions — if ever. Now that Mehta has handed down his remedies ruling, Google can finally appeal his underlying finding that it’s an illegal monopolist. From there, the case could go as far as the Supreme Court.
Last year, the DOJ submitted a long wish list for breaking Google’s hold over the online search market, and argued that no one solution would be sufficient to truly unlock competition in the space. Its most splashy proposals included requiring Google to sell its Chrome browser, which it sees as a key access point for search engines where Google can prioritize itself, and requiring it to let competitors buy search query data and signals to fuel their own search engines in order to jumpstart competition.
Over the course of a three-week remedies trial this spring, Mehta heard from Google’s CEO and high-ranking executives from Apple, OpenAI, Perplexity, and traditional search competitors. Google argued that Mehta should only narrowly bar it from certain contract provisions that the judge had found to be exclusionary, and warned that the government’s more lofty proposals could jeopardize user privacy, disincentivize funding for the open-source browser engine Chromium, and unfairly force Google to share knowledge with competitors it had worked hard to earn. Apple and Firefox owner Mozilla, for their parts, warned they could become collateral damage if the judge barred Google from paying them to make its search engine the default on their services.
In his 230-page ruling, Mehta explained that even though Google’s default status as the search engine on Chrome “undoubtedly contributes to Google’s dominance in general search,” forcing Google to sell it is ultimately “a poor fit for this case.” The DOJ failed to prove that solutions less extreme than a break-up would not be enough to restore competition, he wrote. Furthermore, he says, the DOJ did not prove a causal connection between its monopoly power and Chrome defaults. “But more to the point, there would be nothing ‘natural’ about a Chrome divesture,” Mehta said. “It would be incredibly messy and highly risky.” That’s because it doesn’t run as a “standalone business” and relies greatly on Google’s own infrastructure, he wrote. Even if another owner tried to take it over, he wrote, “the court is highly skeptical that a Chrome divestiture would not come at the expense of substantial product degradation and a loss of consumer welfare.”
Mehta also feared that upending Google’s payments to search distribution platforms would have negative effects rippling across the ecosystem. Banning these kinds of payments to companies like Apple and Mozilla for default placement on their browsers and devices could theoretically “bring about a much-needed thaw,” Mehta said, and even encourage a company like Apple to enter the search market itself. But, he concluded, granting such a remedy risks harming phone and browser makers by denying them significant revenue, while Google gets to keep its money while likely maintaining much of its user base. Though he acknowledged that denying a payments ban is an imperfect solution, Mehta said that “allowing Google to continue making payments is more palatable now than when the liability phase concluded,” since a boom in venture funding for generative AI projects means that “companies already are in a better position, both financially and technologically, to compete with Google than any traditional search company has been in decades (except perhaps Microsoft).”
The American Economic Liberties Project, a group that’s advocated for stronger antitrust enforcement against the tech industry, slammed Mehta’s ruling as an act of “cowardice.” “You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot,” executive director Nidhi Hegde said in a statement. “Similarly, you don’t find Google liable for monopolization and then write a remedy that lets it protect its monopoly. This feckless remedy to the most storied case of monopolization of the past quarter century is a complete failure of his duty and must be appealed.”
The DOJ’s complaint was originally filed in 2020, before generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT became available to the public. But by the time the remedies trial happened earlier this year, the role AI would play in the future of internet search became a necessary one for Mehta to grapple with. The government implored the judge to make sure the anticompetitive issues with Google’s search business don’t simply shape-shift into its AI offerings.
Google’s empire has faced serious blows from multiple courts this year. In late July, a California appeals court upheld a jury verdict against the company in Epic Games’ lawsuit against its mobile app store monopoly. Earlier this year, a federal judge in Virginia found Google also illegally monopolized the market for some advertising technology tools it offers, and it will return to that court to argue potential remedies for that case in September. Google is still in the middle of these fights, but it’s looking more and more likely that the company’s current form will not last much longer.
This story is developing…
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