Something close to the best-case scenario emerged for Google on Tuesday when a federal judge outlined its punishments for running an illegal search monopoly. The company will not be forced to sell its Chrome browser or Android operating system. There will be no hampering of its artificial-intelligence efforts. It can even still shovel billions of dollars a year to Apple Inc. to help attract search traffic from iPhone users if it wants.
The ruling confirmed the fears of those who felt these antitrust proceedings, groundbreaking as they were, simply came too late. Judge Amit Mehta’s remedies are an attempt to level a playing field in a game that ended long ago. They force the Alphabet Inc. unit to refrain from certain exclusivity deals and requirements for preferential app placement among its device partners. Google must also make available limited search data to competitors. Sure, if competitors can use this newly available search data to their advantage, it might mean a single-digit percentage hit to Google’s market share, but the status quo will remain pretty much just that.
Knowing this was a likely outcome, the Department of Justice had hoped that Judge Mehta might take a broad view of his powers to use the remedies to hamper Google’s future endeavors in AI. The government’s argument was that Google’s positioning in the AI market, where its Gemini bot competes with ChatGPT and others, was made possible only with the fruits of its monopolistic behavior in search.
This proposition put the judge in an uncomfortable position. “Unlike the typical case where the court’s job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts,” he wrote, “here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future. Not exactly a judge’s forte.” Further complicating matters was the fact that the AI space is fiercely competitive and, if anything, Google is perceived as struggling somewhat. Restraining the company’s ability to compete in the space risked reducing competition, not the other way around.
The judge’s concern followed a pattern. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission failed to block Microsoft Corp.’s deal to buy the video game company Activision Blizzard Inc. in part because it failed to convince a judge to base her ruling on competition concerns in a market — cloud-based gaming — that was still nascent. An earlier case seeking to block Meta Platforms Inc.’s purchase of a virtual-reality fitness company fell at a similar hurdle.
This case emphasizes, yet again, that antitrust laws were not designed to work at the speed of tech. Judge Mehta noted that nobody even mentioned generative AI during the initial trial. It was only in the remedy phase, after the launch of ChatGPT, that the emerging tech was talked about as the single biggest threat to Google’s business.
Google still has antitrust concerns on its plate. A separate case could result in a partial dismantling of its lucrative advertising tech platform, a move that would, unlike being forced to sell of Chrome or Android, make some logical sense. Elsewhere, the European Union is preparing a fine for similar ad tech concerns, though on Monday regulators backed out of their own deadline for announcing it over fears it would upset President Donald Trump and hamper trade talks. But this case, with its threats to split up significant components of Google’s business, was seen as potentially the most damaging.
Even had the judge had been bolder and ventured into harsher penalties with the future AI market in mind, Google’s legal appeal would have been immediate and strong — dragging this futile case out for even longer than the five years it has clocked up already. Instead, Alphabet stock hit a record in after-hours training as investors celebrated the outcome of a case that, technically, Google lost.
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