Weirdly, the big winner of the Google antitrust case decision might be Apple. Followed closely by Google.
On Tuesday, the search giant avoided the worst of the penalties the US government sought in the monopoly case it filed in 2024, when the judge overseeing the case said the company “can’t pay to be the exclusive search engine on devices and browsers,” but did allow it to pay “for distribution of its products,” plus keep the Chrome browser, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Justice Department and a group of states brought the suit to break up what they called the search giant’s monopoly over search and force it to sell its popular Chrome browser.
Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google doesn’t have to sell Chrome, but will have to share search data with competitors like Microsoft and DuckDuckGo, and AI companies like OpenAI. Mehta noted that Google, as the most popular search platform, controls nearly 90% of the search market and collects nine times as much data about users as all its competitors combined, giving it nearly unbreakable dominance.
However, Mehta ruled that Google will not have to share its search index database or another database that makes it possible for the company to serve to correct information quickly to searchers.
The emergence of generative AI might have been key to Google’s fate. Mehta cited the surge of GenAI reshaping the search landscape, making a Google breakup harder to justify.
However, Apple is a big winner of Mehta’s decision. The ruling allows Google to continue paying partners like Apple to install its browser on devices like the iPhone as long as it doesn’t demand exclusivity. And it’s not small change: Google pays Apple at least $20 billion a year to make Google the default search engine on its Safari browser and Siri. Mehta said restricting these payments would hurt consumers downstream.
The judge did order Google to create a five-person antitrust committee with privacy experts to “ensure that the company shared the appropriate data with rivals, while safeguarding user privacy,” per the New York Times, which noted that Microsoft agreed to a similar requirement in 2000.
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