Google gets to keep Chrome, Apple gets to keep getting paid to shill Chrome
In after-hours trading yesterday, Google was soaring after a court ruling avoided some of the worst-case antitrust scenarios the company faced in relation to its dominant position in search.
A year ago, a federal judge ruled that Google broke antitrust laws to maintain its monopoly in search. On Tuesday that same judge told Google how it must fix that illegal monopoly.
US District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google could no longer engage in exclusive search deals like its one with Apple, but the search giant isnât being broken up or forced to divest Chrome.
Google has $26 billion in deals with companies like Samsung and Apple â the latter alone worth $20 billion a year â to be the default search engine on their products.
However, Apple shares also moved higher in postmarket trading, as the judge said nonexclusive payments to preload Google products, which help drive its lucrative Services segment revenues, can continue.
âGoogle will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment,â the decision read. âPlaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.â
The Takeaway
The decision âstrengthens the companyâs position in gen-AI agent deployments, given the importance of integrating large language models natively within the browser,â Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and Robert Biggar wrote.
Google Search is the default search engine in Chrome, the worldâs most popular browser, ensuring plenty of traffic to Googleâs advertising ecosystem. Recently, both OpenAI and Perplexity expressed interest in buying Chrome. The DOJ also floated making Google share its valuable search and user data with competitors. Google still faces remedies for a separate monopoly case involving ad tech, with that phase of the case set to begin next month.