Judge orders search shakeup in Google monopoly case, but keeps hands off Chrome

San Francisco – A federal judge ordered Tuesday an upheaval of Google’s search engine in order to limit the corrosive power of an illegal monopoly while pushing the American government’s attempt to break the business and impose other constraints.

The 226 -page decision taken by the American district judge Amit Mehta in Washington, DC, will probably go through the technological landscape at a time when industry is reshaped by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence – including conversational “response engines” like companies like Chatgpt and perplexity try to upender from the long -term position of Google.

The innovations and competition unleashed by the AI ​​also reshaped the judge’s approach to the appeals in the almost five -year antitrust case filed by the United States Ministry of Justice during the first administration of President Donald Trump and carried the administration of President Joe Biden.

“Contrary to the typical affair where the work of the court consists in resolving a dispute based on historical facts, here the court is invited to look at a crystal ball and to look towards the future. Not exactly a void of a judge,” wrote Mehta.

The judge tries to brake Google by prohibiting some of the tactics that the company has deployed to generate traffic to its search engine and other services. The decision will also open some of the precious information databases closely kept on research that provided Google with an apparently insurmountable advantage.

The handcuffs slapped on Google will prevent contracts which give its search engine, to the Gemini AI application, at Play Store for Android and Virtual assisting an exclusive position on the smartphone, personal computers and other devices.

But Mehta has ceased to ban the offers of several billion dollars that Google has been concluding for years to lock its search engine as defect in smartphones, personal computers and other devices. These agreements, involving payments of more than $ 26 billion a year, have been one of the main problems that prompted the judge to conclude that Google’s search engine was an illegal monopoly, but he decided that prohibiting them in the future would do more difficult than good.

The judge also rejected the efforts of the United States Ministry of Justice to force Google to sell his popular Chrome navigator, concluding that it was an unjustified step which “would be incredibly disorderly and very risky”.

Partly because it allows the default offers to continue, Mehta orders Google to give its current and potential competitors to part of the secret sauce of its search engine – the data is stored from billions of requests it has used to help improve the quality of its search results. This is a measure to which Google was also feticity, saying it was unfair and would increase confidentiality and security risk for billions of people who asked its search engine – sometimes plunging into sensitive problems.

The antitrust chief of the Ministry of Justice, Gail Slater, praised the decision of “major victory for the American people”, even if the agency did not obtain everything it was looking for. “We now assess our options and we wonder if the ordered relief goes far enough,” Slater wrote in an article.

In its own article, Google formulated Mehta’s decision as a justification for its long -standing position that the case should never have been brought. The decision “recognizes how the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which gives people so much more ways to find information,” wrote Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice-president of Google regulatory affairs. “This highlights what we have said since this case was tabled in 2020: competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want.”

Mountain View, California, has already promised to appeal the conclusions of monopoly of the judge published 13 months ago which led to the decision on Tuesday.

“You cannot find someone guilty of having stolen a bank, then condemned him to write a note of thanks for the booty,” said Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties project.

Investors seemed to interpret the decision as a relatively light slap at the wrist for Google, because the course of the action of its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., increased by more than 7% in prolonged trade. This would result in an increase of almost $ 200 billion in the market value of the alphabet, if the actions follow a similar trajectory during the regular negotiation session on Wednesday.

Authorizing the default research offers to continue is more than just a victory for Google. It is also a victory for Apple, which receives more than 20 billion dollars a year from Google and other recipients of payments.

In the hearings at the beginning of this year, Apple warned the judge that the prohibition of contracts would deprive the money company that it surrounds in its own innovative research. Cupertino, California, also warned that the ban could have the involuntary consequence of making Google even more powerful by pacizing the money it had spent while most consumers will eventually flow on Google’s search engine.

Others, such as owners of the Firefox search engine, said that the loss of Google contracts would threaten their future survival by depriving them of essential income.

Apple’s shares increased by 3% in prolonged exchanges after the decision.

Mehta refrained from ordering a sale of chrome because he decided that there was no adequate proof that the browser served as an essential ingredient in the monopoly of Google’s research, making a disinvestment “a bad adjustment for this affair”.

Chrome would have been a hot goods if the judge had forced Google to put it on the auction block. Perplexity submitted an unsolicited offer of $ 34.5 billion to buy Chrome last month. And during the testimonies of the court earlier this year, a Chatgpt leader left no doubt that the owner of the service, Openai, would also be interested in buying Chrome.

But the judge decided to force Google to open parts of his research data to competitors such as DuckDuckGo, Bing and others will offer the best and the most just to promote more convincing competition. In doing so, Mehta has always reduced the scope of the request from the Ministry of Justice and will limit access to the research index and to Google request stories.

While the disappearance of Mehta’s decision continues, Google faces another potentially debilitating threat in another antitrust case brought by the Ministry of Justice targeting the digital advertising empire which was built around its search engine. After various federal judges in Virginia said that part of the technology underlying the advertising network is an illegal monopoly earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice plans to plead for another rupture proposed in a trial to start later this month.