Mehta, who last year found the web outfit guilty of breaking US competition law, has decided the company will not be forced to sell off its Chrome browser or Android operating system. Job’s Mob can still trouser billions from Google in return for keeping it as the default search engine on its devices.
Mehta wrote: “Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment. Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divestiture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.”
That ruling will leave the US Department of Justice fuming. The only proposal Mehta accepted was that Google must share access to its search index and user-interaction data with “qualified competitors” but it doesn’t need to hand over its lucrative advertising data.
Chamber of Progress CEO and former Googler Adam Kovacevich said: “What you had is Google's rivals arguing that Google had to share its recipes’ secret sauce. And the judge rejected that. He said: ‘You only have to share their ingredient list, effectively their search and search index.’”
Google must stop cutting exclusive deals to be the default search engine on mobiles, and will face six years of regulatory oversight by a technical committee.
American Economic Liberties Project executive director Nidhi Hegde was livid: “You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot. Similarly, you don’t find Google liable for monopolisation and then write a remedy that lets it protect its monopoly.”
Apparently, generative AI ruined everything.
Mehta said: “The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case. These remedies proceedings thus have been as much about promoting competition among GSEs as ensuring that Google’s dominance in search does not carry over into the GenAI space.”
Google was quick to spin this line: “Today’s decision recognises how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information.”
Kovacevich agreed that AI had scrambled the playing field. “Anybody who has been paying attention to technology in the last two years would say that generative AI does pose a competitive challenge to traditional search engines,” he said.
Investors certainly liked the ruling. Google’s stock price jumped eight per cent in after-hours trading, while Apple saw a 2.5 per cent rise.
Court documents showed that Google paid more than $26 billion in 2021 to secure default placements, with Job’s Mob raking in $18-20 billion in 2020 alone, about a quarter of its profit that year. Mozilla, which relies heavily on Google’s $400 million subsidy, was highlighted by the judge as being at risk if such payments were cut.
Mehta claimed banning the cash pipeline would be “crippling,” leading to “downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers.”
For everyday users, though, not much will change. Google will keep hoovering up data, Job’s Mob will keep trousering billions, and the antitrust case will limp on for years.
Mitch Stoltz, litigation director at the EFF said: “Users will be in much the same position as before. The lack of any restructuring of Google, or even a ban on the massive revenue sharing payments to Apple and others for default search placement that were at the heart of the government's case, mean that Google's incentives won't change, and the data-sharing remedies may be undermined.”
