The US Federal District Court has ruled in an antitrust case regarding Google’s dominance in the search engine market. The court ruled that the company would not have to sell the Chrome browser, but it would have to share data with competitors. This is reported by BBC.
The decision was made by District Judge Amit Mehta after several years of litigation. The case was brought because of Google’s practice of setting its search engine as the default in its own products — Android and Chrome — as well as in third-party products, including Apple.
The US Department of Justice has been pushing for a forced sale of Chrome, but Tuesday’s ruling means the browser will remain owned by Google. At the same time, the company is prohibited from concluding exclusive contracts, and it will have to provide competitors with access to search data.
Google has denied wrongdoing since the beginning of the 2020 process, stressing that its dominance is due to the higher quality of the search engine that users choose voluntarily. After the announcement of the verdict, the company said that it considers the decision a victory.
Judge Mehta found that Google used unfair methods to establish a monopoly in the online search market by systematically working to maintain its dominance. This was found to be a violation of American law. At the same time, he emphasized that the complete sale of Chrome “does not correspond to this case”. The court also did not require the sale of the Android operating system used by most smartphones in the world. Google insisted that selling such key assets would effectively destroy their operations.
The review also found that Google has paid other companies billions of dollars over the years for exclusive pre-loading or promotion of its products. So, in 2021, the company spent more than 26 billion dollars on agreements with Apple and Mozilla.
From now on, Google will not be able to enter into exclusive contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant or the Gemini app. This means that smartphone manufacturers will be able to pre-install or advertise alternative search engines, browsers or artificial assistants alongside Google products. At the same time, the company will retain the right to pay distributors for installing its services by default.
