http://archive.today/2025.09.02-230924/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-antitrust-decision.html

Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday, a decision in a landmark antitrust case that falls short of the sweeping changes proposed by the government to rein in the power of Silicon Valley.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in a 223-page ruling that to resolve Google’s monopoly in search, the company must share some of its search data with companies that are “qualified competitors.” The Justice Department had asked the judge to force the company to share even more of its data, arguing it was key to Google’s dominance.

The company spends billions every year to be the built-in search engine on browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox. Google paid $26.3 billion for those deals in 2021, according to evidence presented in court.

That created a cycle that benefited Google, the government argued during a 10-week trial in 2023. The prime placement meant more people used Google, which gave it more data to make its search engine better than its competitors’. That advantage allowed it to attract more customers and further elbow out its competitors.

Judge Mehta also put restrictions on payments that Google uses to ensure its search engine gets prime placement in web browsers and on smartphones. But he stopped short of banning those payments entirely and did not grant the government’s request that Google be forced to sell Chrome, which the government said was necessary to remedy the company’s power as a search monopoly.

He barred Google from obtaining “exclusive” contracts that make its product the search engine that automatically comes up when someone opens a browser or smartphone home screen.

But he allowed Google to continue to pay for that prime placement, the behavior at the heart of the government’s case. He said that new A.I. developments meant that Google might have a harder time using its financial might to keep competitors from becoming the built-in search engines on smartphones and browsers.

He was similarly cautious when it came to the government’s demands that Google share its data with its rivals. He said Google needed to share its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But he said Google did not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages.

The conservative ruling is a blow to the government’s all-out push in recent years to challenge the dominance of the biggest tech companies. Under both the Biden and Trump administrations, the federal government accused Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta of anticompetitive behavior meant to illegally monopolize parts of the internet.

That ruling comes as generative artificial intelligence is threatening to replace traditional search engines. A.I. start-ups including OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have built humanlike chatbots that can field queries, summarize huge swaths of research and even plan a trip with step-by-step suggestions.

Judge Mehta wrote in his ruling that the emergence of generative A.I. “changed the course of this case.”