A federal judge on Tuesday (September 2, 2025) ordered a shake-up of Google’s search engine in an attempt to curb the corrosive power of an illegal monopoly while rebuffing the U.S. government’s attempt to break up the company and impose other restraints.

The 226-page decision made by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., will likely ripple across the technological landscape at a time when the industry is being reshaped by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence — including conversational “answer engines” as companies like ChatGPT and Perplexity try to upend Google’s long-held position as the internet’s main gateway.

The innovations and competition being unleashed by generative artificial intelligence, or “GenAI,” have reshaped the judge’s approach to remedies in the nearly five-year-old antitrust case brought by the U.S. Justice Department during President Donald Trump’s first administration and carried onward by President Joe Biden.

Watch: What is the Google ‘monopoly’ antitrust case about?

“Unlike the typical case where the court’s job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts, here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future. Not exactly a judge’s forte,” Judge Mehta wrote.

The judge is trying to rein in Google by prohibiting some of the tactics the company deployed to drive traffic to its search engine and other services. The handcuffs will prevent Google from negotiating contracts that give its search engine, Gemini AI app, Play Store for Android and virtual assistant an exclusive position on smartphone, personal computers and other devices.

But Judge Mehta stopped short of banning the multi-billion dollar deals that Google has been making for years to lock in its search engine as the default on smartphones, personal computers and other devices. Those deals, involving payments of more than $26 billion annually, were one of the main issues that prompted the judge to conclude Google’s search engine was an illegal monopoly, but he decided banning them in the future would do more harm than good.

Also Read | Google’s digital ad network declared an illegal monopoly, joining its search engine in penalty box

The judge also rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s effort to force Google to sell its popular Chrome browser, concluding it was an unwarranted step that “would be incredibly messy and highly risky.”

Partially because he is allowing the default deals to continue, Judge Mehta is ordering Google to give its current and would-be rivals access to some of its search engine’s secret sauce — the data stockpiled from trillions of queries that it used to help improve the quality of its search results. That is a measure that Google had also fiercely opposed, contending it was unfair and would raise privacy and security risk for the billions of people who have posed questions to its search engine — sometimes delving into sensitive issues.

The Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, hailed the decision as a “major win for the American people,” even though the agency didn’t get everything it sought. “We are now weighing our options and thinking through whether the ordered relief goes far enough,” Ms. Slater wrote in a post.

EXPLAINED | What the Google Play Store antitrust case means for India’s digital ecosystem

In its own post, Google framed Judge Mehta’s ruling as a vindication of its long-held position that the case never should have been brought. The decision “recognizes how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information,” wrote Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice-president of regulatory affairs. “This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want.”

The Mountain View, California, company has already vowed to appeal the judge’s monopoly findings issued 13 months ago that led to Tuesday’s (September 2, 2025) ruling.

“You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot,” said Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project.

Also Read | Google ‘monopoly’ antitrust case: A timeline

Investors seemed to interpret the ruling as a relatively light slap on the wrist for Google, as the stock price of its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., surged nearly 3% in extended trading. Investors seemed to interpret the ruling as a relatively light slap on the wrist for Google, as the stock price of its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., surged nearly 3% in extended trading.

Allowing the default search deals to continue is more than just a victory for Google. It’s also a win for Apple, which receives more than $20 billion annually from Google, and other recipients of the payments.

In hearings earlier this year, Apple warned the judge that banning the contracts would deprive the company of money that it funnels into its own innovative research. The Cupertino, California, company also cautioned that the ban could have the unintended consequence of making Google even more powerful by pocketing the money it had been spending on deals while most consumers will still end up flocking to Google’s search engine anyway.

Also Read | U.S. FTC backs DOJ proposal in Google search antitrust case

Others, such as the owners of the Firefox search engine, asserted that losing the Google contracts would threaten their future survival by depriving them of essential revenue. Judge Mehta refrained from ordering a sale of Chrome because he decided there wasn’t adequate proof the browser served as an essential ingredient in Google’s search monopoly, making a divestiture “a poor fit for this case.”

Chrome would have been a hot commodity had the judge forced Google to put it on the auction block. Perplexity submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer to buy Chrome last month. And during court testimony earlier this year, a ChatGPT executive left no doubt that service’s owner, OpenAI, would be interested in be interested in buying Chrome, too.

But the judge decided forcing Google to open up parts of its search data to rivals such as DuckDuckGo, Bing, and others will offer he best and fairest way to foster more compelling competition. In doing so, Judge Mehta still narrowed the scope of the Justice Department’s request and will limit the access to Google’s search index and query histories.

Published – September 03, 2025 06:14 am IST

Washington DC:

Two of the world’s largest tech behemoths – Apple and Google – are participating together in what is increasingly seeming like an indefensible case. Billions and billions are at stake and Google, the world’s ‘default’ search engine, stares into the abyss.

There is much to lose for both tech giants – for Apple it could lead to losses worth tens of billions of dollars per year and an incomprehensible fallout on the accuracy of its results on features like Siri and Spotlight, whose framework is largely dependent on Google search. For Google, besides money and market share, it may result in the massive loss of its entire web browser – Chrome. It also faces another potential gigantic loss – its Android operating system.

And so, finding Google in a major spot of bother, Apple has sought to participate in the anti-trust trial against Google over its internet search engine. Apple on Tuesday said it needs to step in as it cannot rely on Google alone to defend the revenue-sharing agreements that the two firms have.

The epicenter of the case, which has sent tremors across Silicon Valley, lies in an agreement between Google and Apple, wherein the iPhone, iPad, and Macbook maker gets tens of billions of dollars each year for making Google the default search engine on its browser – Safari. In 2022 alone, Apple reportedly received in excess of $20 billion as a result of this very agreement.

The question at the heart of the case is simple – Has Google monopolised online search? According to Google – No, it has not.

A monopoly in simple business terms is a situation where a single company controls the entire market. In such a scenario it becomes difficult or sometimes impossible for the competition to compete due to the lack of a level-playing field.

Focusing on this very point, Apple’s lawyers submitted their papers to the court on Tuesday, in which they conveyed that Apple and Google are not competitors, and neither does Apple want to compete in the search engine space. It also said that that is how it will be whether or not Apple receives the billions of dollars from Google in future.

Apple, in its petition, also said it wants to call witnesses who will testify under oath at the trial scheduled for April 2025. On that day, the prosecutors will aim to highlight that Google absolutely must take multiple measures – two of them being selling its Chrome browser and possibly its Android operating system too. The prosecutors believe that only then will competition be restored in online search. But should this happen, it will be a fatal blow to Google.

While Google’s parent firm Alphabet is figuring a way to battle this grave threat to its existence, Apple, which understand the gravity of the situation has said “Google can no longer adequately represent Apple’s interests. Google must now defend against a broad effort to break up its business units.”

Meanwhile, justifying its stand, Google has asserted that the entire premise of the case is based on exclusive deals – and that is what the focus of the case should be on, instead of an aim to breaking Google. It has even offered to put an end to such deals in future.

Besides ending the deal with Apple, Google has even suggested that it is willing to no longer enter any agreement with Android phone manufacturers which require the phone-maker to set Google as the default search engine in return for its operating system and supporting apps. Google also said that browser companies like Mozilla would be given more flexibility in setting rival search engines as its default search. This, according to Google’s lawyers, is a fair solution to make the market more competitive.

Between now and the crucial hearing in April, Google is doing all it can to defend itself and limit its losses should it lose the groundbreaking case.

The US Department of Justice vs Google is poised to be a defining moment for the global tech industry – a landmark case that may just reshape how the world uses the internet.
 

Washington, United States:

The Justice Department pressed its argument on Thursday that Google sought to strike agreements with mobile carriers to win powerful default positions on smartphones to dominate search in an antitrust trial that could change the future of the internet.

The government wrapped up questioning of Antonio Rangel, who teaches behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology on Thursday morning. Rangel discussed how consumers were likely to stick with browsers on computers and mobile phones that were pre-installed as the default application.

The government says the Alphabet unit paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T, device makers like Apple and browser makers like Mozilla to be the default search engine on devices to fend off rivals and keep its search engine market share near 90%.

John Schmidtlein, a lawyer for Google, during cross-examination of Rangel, pointed out that a significant number of user search queries went to Google even when another search engine was the default.

A major part of Google’s defense is that the government is wrong to say that Google broke the law to hold onto its massive market share because its search engine is wildly popular because of its quality, and that any payments to wireless companies or others were fair compensation for partners.

The fight has major implications for Big Tech, which has been accused of buying or strangling small rivals but has defended itself by emphasizing that its services are free, as in the case of Google, or inexpensive, as in the case of Amazon.com.

The government called witnesses on Tuesday and Wednesday to show that Google, as far back as the mid-2000s, sought to attract a large number of search queries by winning default status on mobile devices.

Google’s clout in search, the government alleges, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Search is free, so Google makes money through advertising.

The government has also alleged that Google illegally took steps to protect communications about the payments.

If Google is found to have broken the law, US District Judge Amit Mehta, who is deciding the case, will then decide how to resolve it. He may order Google to stop practices he has found to be illegal or to sell assets.

Previous major antitrust trials include Microsoft, filed in 1998, and AT&T, filed in 1974. The AT&T breakup in 1982 is credited with paving the way for the modern cell phone industry, while the fight with Microsoft is credited with opening space for Google and others on the internet.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)