Judge orders search shakeup in Google monopoly case, but keeps hands off
Chrome and default deals
[September 03, 2025] By
MICHAEL LIEDTKE
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a shake-up of
Google’s search engine in an attempt to curb 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 AI also reshaped the
judge’s approach to the remedies in the nearly five-year-old antitrust
case brought by the U.S. Justice Department during President Donald
Trump’s first administration and carried onward by President Joe Biden's
administration.
“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.
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. The ruling also will pry open some of the prized databases of
closely guarded information about search that have provided Google with
a seemingly insurmountable advantage.
The handcuffs being slapped on Google will preclude contracts that give
its search engine, Gemini AI app, Play Store for Android and virtual
assistant an exclusive position on smartphone, personal computers and
other devices.
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.
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.”
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. That is a measure that Google had also fiercely opposed,
contending it was unfair and would raise privacy and security risk for
the billions of people who have posed questions to its search engine —
sometimes delving into sensitive issues.
The Justice Department's antitrust chief, Gail Slater, hailed the
decision as a “major win for the American people,” even though the
agency didn't get everything it sought. “We are now weighing our options
and thinking through whether the ordered relief goes far enough,” Slater
wrote in a post.
In its own post, Google framed Mehta's ruling as a vindication of its
long-held position that the case never should have been brought. The
decision “recognizes how much the industry has changed through the
advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find
information,” wrote Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of
regulatory affairs. “This underlines what we’ve been saying since this
case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily
choose the services they want.”
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A sign is displayed on a Google building at their campus in Mountain
View, Calif., Sept. 24, 2019. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
 The Mountain View, California,
company has already vowed to appeal the judge’s monopoly findings
issued 13 months ago that led to Tuesday's ruling.
“You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence
him to writing a thank you note for the loot,” said Nidhi Hegde,
executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project.
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 more than 7% in extended trading. That would
translate into a nearly $200 billion increase in Alphabet's market
value, if the shares follow a similar trajectory in Wednesday's
regular trading session.
Allowing the default search deals to continue is more than just a
victory for Google. It’s also a win for Apple, which receives more
than $20 billion annually from Google, and other recipients of the
payments.
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.
Apple's shares rose 3% in extended trading after the ruling came
out.
Mehta refrained from ordering a sale of Chrome because he decided
there wasn't adequate proof the browser served as an essential
ingredient in Google's search monopoly, making a divestiture “a poor
fit for this case.”
Chrome would have been a hot commodity had the judge forced Google
to put it on the auction block. Perplexity submitted an unsolicited
$34.5 billion offer to buy Chrome last month. And during court
testimony earlier this year, a ChatGPT executive left no doubt that
service’s owner, OpenAI, would be interested in be interested in
buying Chrome, too.
But the judge decided forcing Google to open up parts of its search
data to rivals such as DuckDuckGo, Bing, and others will offer he
best and fairest way to foster more compelling competition. In doing
so, Mehta still narrowed the scope of the Justice Department's
request and will limit the access to Google's search index and query
histories.
While the wrangling over Mehta's ruling continues, Google is facing
another potentially debilitating threat in another antitrust case
brought by the Justice Department targeting the digital ad empire
that was built up around its search engine. After different federal
judge in Virginia declared that some of the technology underlying
the ad network to be an illegal monopoly earlier this year, the
Justice Department plans to make its case for another proposed
breakup in a trial scheduled to begin later this month.
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