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Google won’t be forced to hive off Android or its Chrome browser, following a lengthy judgement on the company’s antitrust abuses.
A year after the company was labelled a “monopolist”, it has avoided many of the harsher punishments that were being sought by the US Department of Justice (DoJ), with the judge declaring that the emergence of AI rivals had fundamentally altered the competitive landscape.
Judge Mehta from the District of Columbia decided that splitting the company was “not a good fit” for the case, with the DoJ failing to show “significant causal connection” between the company’s ownership of Chrome/Android and the company’s illegal conduct.
Neither will Google be forced to stop making payments to rival browser makers such as Apple and Mozilla, ensuring that Google remains the default search engine in other browsers. While the judge acknowledged that such agreements were the “fruit” of Google’s illegal behaviour, he was wary of the consequences of preventing such deals, arguing that banning them would create “substantial – in some cases, crippling –downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers”.
Search revenue from Google accounts for around 80% of Mozilla’s operating budget, for example. A Firefox executive testified that a ban on such payments would seriously imperil the future of the browser.
Perhaps the most significant strike against Google is that it can no longer enter into exclusive contracts for the distribution of its search engine, Chrome, Google Assistant or the Gemini app. In other words, it can’t strike deals that would prevent a phone maker from, say, bundling Microsoft Edge’s browser on an Android phone. Nor can Google withhold licences to use the Play Store if phone makers refuse to ship its search or AI products.
Google is also being forced to share search data with what the judgement labels “qualified competitors”. The specific data Google is required to share includes one-time disclosure of Search Index data, which may include unique identifiers for documents in the index, and information on when a URL was first seen and last crawled. It’s not yet clear how valuable this information will be to Google’s competitors.
What is clear is that Google has evaded the most draconian punishments being sought by the DoJ, with the judge acknowledging that the emergence of generative AI services had a big impact on his remedies. He argued that rivals such as ChatGPT and Perplexity were “better placed to compete with Google than any search engine developer has been in decades”.
It seems likely the company would have faced a much stiffer punishment had the AI industry not erupted during the years it’s taken for the judicial process to conclude. “The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case,” the judge acknowledged.
