Subdued decision in Google antitrust trial may help keep a monopoly in
power
[September 04, 2025] By
MICHAEL LIEDTKE
After a five-year legal showdown pitting the U.S. Department of Justice
against Google, a federal judge concluded that the disruptive forces of
artificial intelligence technology will have a better chance of hobbling
an illegal monopoly than any restraints imposed by a court order.
That was one of the underlying themes of a highly-anticipated ruling
issued late Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta. After ruling that
Google's dominant search engine had turned into an illegal monopoly back
in August 2024, the judge spent the next 13 months mulling the best way
to rein in the technology powerhouse's bad behavior.
At the same time, the technology landscape had been thrust into the
throes of a tectonic shift that couldn't have been anticipated in
October 2020 when the Justice Department filed its landmark antitrust
case against Google. At that time, few people had even heard of OpenAI,
let alone its chatbot ChatGPT, which wasn't released until late 2022.
Artificial intelligence rarely came up during the 2024 trial that
culminated in Google being declared a monopoly, but the technology's
role became a focal point in t he remedy hearings earlier this spring —
especially AI's role in spawning conversational “answer engines” from
ChatGPT and Perplexity. Those advances made the judge reluctant to use
his legal power to override what may already be happening through
technological evolution.
Mehta ended up crafting a subdued ruling that rejected the Justice
Department's push to have Google sell its popular Chrome web browser and
block the company from paying — more than $20 billion annually — to make
its search engine the default on popular devices and web browsers.
Instead of embracing those drastic measures, Mehta chose to prescribe
what most analysts and antitrust experts viewed as a light-handed
punishment, which propelled the stock price of Google's parent Alphabet
Inc. to a new high of $230.86 during Wednesday's trading.
But the judge is still shaking things up by requiring Google to share
some of the secret sauce in its recipe for success — the massive trove
of search data that it has accumulated from billions of users since the
company's 1998 inception in a Silicon Valley garage. Parts of those
databases will be opened up to rival search engines such as DuckDuckGo
and other “qualified competitors."
Mehta's ruling is being viewed widely as little more than a slap on the
wrist, prompting reactions of disappointment and disdain. “It is a
historic misfire that fails to meet the enormity of the finding that
Google is a monopolist in online search,” said Christo Wilson, a
Northeastern University computer sciences professor, who has studied
Google's operations.
Investors are clearly betting that it will remain mostly business as
usual at Google, which is expected to generate nearly $400 billion in
revenue this year. As of early Wednesday afternoon, Alphabet's stock
price had surged by 9%, creating an additional $230 billion in
shareholder wealth.
The Trump Administration still finds reason to celebrate
Even though the judge rebuffed most of the Justice Department's proposed
remedies, the agency maintained the case would foster more competition
in the online search market.
“This decision marks an important step forward in the Department of
Justice’s ongoing fight to protect American consumers," U.S. Attorney
General Pamela Bondi said in a statement.
The case is uniquely tied to President Donald Trump, given that it began
during his first term in office and is wrapping up during the early
stages of his second stint in the White House.
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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)
 But outsiders don't see much for the
Justice Department to crow about in Mehta's ruling, especially since
it explicitly cited the attempt to force a breakup of Google as a
bridge too far.
The decision “may prove to be at best a pyrrhic victory,” predicted
Joseph V. Coniglio, director of antitrust and innovation policy at
the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington
think tank that gets some of its funding from Alphabet and other
technology companies.
“After making the legally sound and morally courageous decision to
find Google liable for illegal monopolistic practices, Judge Mehta
apparently decided that actually enforcing the law was more than he
could stomach,” lamented Barry Lynn, executive director for the Open
Markets Institute, a group focused on minimizing corporate power.
Will consumers' search experience change?
The most noticeable changes in Google will probably continue to come
through its responses to AI-driven competition from ChatGPT,
Perplexity and others. That's been the case since Google began to
highlight AI-produced summaries at the top of its search results
last year and then introduced its own version of an answer engine —
via AI mode — a few months ago.
But Google will probably still be the main engine answering queries
entered on the iPhone and other internet access points since the
judge decided that the company is still allowed to dole out billions
to be the default search choice on devices and browsers. The
rationale for allowing all that money to flow went something like
this: If the payments were banned, Google would be able to hoard the
cash to become even more powerful and most consumers would still end
up using its search engine on the iPhone and other devices because
it's still best in class.
Investors also liked the idea of that part of the search status quo
being maintained, paving the way for Apple to continue to be paid
more than $20 billion annually by Google. Apple's shares rose more
than 3% in Wednesday's afternoon trading.
Google will work to share its data
The logistics of sharing all of that search data still needs to be
worked out, but Mehta did try to limit access to Google's data in a
way to protect consumer privacy. He also wants to give Google rivals
just enough information that will allow them to improve the
relevance of their own search results, but prevent competitors from
poaching all the information that Google has stockpiled during the
past 27 years.
It's still unclear when the data sharing will begin because Google
could still delay Mehta's ruling from taking effect through legal
appeals. The company has already vowed to appeal last year's
decision condemning its search engine as a monopoly, a process that
couldn't start until the remedy ruling was made.
The Justice Department also said it is weighing a possible appeal in
an attempt to gain more court-ordered changes to Google's business
practices.
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