On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered Google to share some search index and user data with “qualified competitors”—part of a highly anticipated slate of remedies in a monopoly case that the Justice Department won against the tech giant in August of 2024.
The ruling, issued by Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also prohibits Google from inking exclusive contracts that condition payments or licensing for its search engine and other products, including Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app.
The decision spares Google from the harsher remedies proposed by the U.S. Justice Department, which included a divestiture of the Chrome browser and more robust data-sharing with rivals.
The remedies in many ways mirror the last major monopoly ruling against a U.S. tech company more than 20 years ago, when a federal judge ruled that Microsoft illegally leveraged the market dominance of its Windows operating system to stifle competition in the browser space. The DOJ and Microsoft reached a settlement in 2001 in which Microsoft similarly was ordered to share its APIs with third-party developers and was banned from entering into exclusive deals with PC manufacturers and software developers.
The Microsoft case is often cited as an example of how modest remedies can leave a company’s dominance largely untouched. Opening up some of Google’s search data could give rivals more power, especially in the growing AI-powered search market, just as new applications grew after the Microsoft ruling. But keeping the company intact, including deals that favor Google’s own products, shows that the goal was to take a scalpel to only what the court saw as the most egregious anti-competitive behavior, experts told ADWEEK.
“Basically, if you’re going to have a really strong remedy, you need really strong evidence that this is the cause of the problem,” said Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics. “Grounding all this in Microsoft as the reason, [Mehta] found that there wasn’t enough evidence for a strong structural remedy—splitting off Chrome or something like that—but there was enough causal information to connect these default agreements to the monopolization of the market that the lighter remedies were justified.”