No breakup for Google: Court opts for behavioral fixes over structural split

Google will no longer have to divest Chrome and Android businesses as a federal judge ruled in its favor in a search antitrust case, while acknowledging AI as a new competitive force.

US Federal Judge Amit P. Mehta delivered the landmark ruling on Monday, rejecting the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) demand to break up the search giant while allowing it to continue paying Apple for default search placement — a decision that preserves one of the tech industry’s most lucrative partnerships.

Judge Mehta, however, ordered Google to share search data with rivals to ensure competition in online search.

“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,” Judge Mehta wrote in his 230-page opinion, handing Google a significant victory in the most consequential antitrust case against a tech company in decades.

The ruling caps a legal saga that began in October 2020 when the DOJ accused Google of illegally maintaining search monopolies through exclusive distribution agreements worth over $26 billion annually. After finding Google liable in August 2024, the court faced the crucial question of remedies — and ultimately chose behavioral changes over structural breakup.

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Google welcomed the decision while expressing concerns about data-sharing requirements. “Now the Court has imposed limits on how we distribute Google services, and will require us to share Search data with rivals. We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and we’re reviewing the decision closely. The Court did recognize that divesting Chrome and Android would have gone beyond the case’s focus on search distribution, and would have harmed consumers and our partners,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Judge Mehta firmly rejected the government’s most dramatic remedy request. “The complete divestiture of Chrome is a poor fit for this case,” the judgment stated, noting that Chrome’s contribution to Google’s dominance wasn’t directly tied to the illegal exclusive agreements.

“A Chrome divestiture would be incredibly messy and highly risky,” the court concluded, citing Chrome’s deep integration with Google’s technical infrastructure and the fact that over 80% of its users are outside the US.

Apple partnership survives despite antitrust concerns

The court’s decision to allow continued payments to distribution partners represents a major victory for both Google and Apple. The ruling specifically rejected the DOJ’s proposed “payment ban” that would have ended Google’s massive annual payments to Apple for making Google the default search engine on Safari.

Judge Mehta found that Apple executive Eddy Cue’s testimony revealed how these payments — totaling $20 billion in 2022 alone — had effectively discouraged Apple from developing its own search engine. “The prospect of losing tens of billions in guaranteed revenue from Google…disincentivizes Apple from launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so,” the court wrote.

Despite acknowledging this anticompetitive effect, Judge Mehta concluded that “cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial — in some cases, crippling — downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers.” The court worried that ending these payments could reduce Apple’s ability to innovate while weakening Android manufacturers’ ability to compete with Apple.

Cue’s testimony also revealed that Google Search queries in Safari had declined for the first time in 22 years, likely due to AI chatbots, signaling the emerging competitive threat that influenced the court’s remedy design.

Data sharing replaces divestiture as the primary remedy

Instead of a breakup, Judge Mehta imposed extensive data-sharing requirements designed to level the competitive playing field. “Google will have to make available to Qualified Competitors certain search index and user-interaction data,” the judgment stated, targeting what the court called Google’s “scale advantage” built through exclusive agreements.

The ruling requires Google to provide competitors with search index information, including web page identifiers, crawl schedules, and spam scores — data that could help rivals build more comprehensive search capabilities. Google must also syndicate search results to qualified competitors for five years, though on commercial rather than free terms.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, cautioned that “interoperability and data-access remedies can lower barriers, but they seldom replicate the disruptive force of a breakup.” He noted that “mandated data-sharing must be engineered with extreme care; anonymization at scale is technically fragile.”

The remedies carry a six-year term, raising questions about their relevance in rapidly evolving technology markets. Gogia warned that “a six-year horizon epitomizes the mismatch between legal cadence and AI’s tempo” with “material risk that remedies arrive fully formed into a different market.”

The remedies will take effect in 60 days, with a Technical Committee overseeing implementation, the ruling added.

AI competition gets explicit court protection

The ruling explicitly extends antitrust protections to AI companies, recognizing firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity as potential search competitors. “The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case,” Judge Mehta wrote in his order, noting that AI was barely mentioned during the original trial but became central to remedy discussions.

“Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want,” Google argued in its statement, emphasizing how “the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information.”

Gogia observed that “recognizing AI firms as eligible competitors formalizes the reality that search competition now spans blue-link retrieval and generative answers,” though he warned that “the pivotal competitive chokepoint is device-level distribution.”