Google ordered to make search engine changes – but break-up avoided

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A US federal judge has ordered significant changes to Google’s search engine to curb its monopoly power, but has rejected calls to break up the company.

The ruling, issued by Judge Amit Mehta, comes after a nearly five-year-long antitrust case brought by the US Justice Department.

The court is requiring Google to provide competitors with access to some of its vast data, gathered from trillions of user queries, which is used to improve search quality. This is intended to level the playing field for rival search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing.

Judge Mehta is also preventing Google from entering into exclusive contracts for its products like Google Search, Chrome, and the Gemini AI app. This means phone manufacturers will have the freedom to pre-load or promote other search engines and browsers.

However, in what is seen as a major win for the tech giant, the judge refused the government’s requests to force Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser or its Android mobile operating system. He also stopped short of banning the multibillion-dollar deals that secure Google as the default search engine on many devices. Google will still be able to pay for default placement, but not on an exclusive basis.

For users, these changes could mean more choice and potentially better search results from competitors who now have access to more data. However, the changes are not as drastic as some had hoped. Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of competitor DuckDuckGo, said the order fails to “force the changes necessary to address Google’s illegal behaviour” and that “consumers will continue to suffer.”

Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said the ruling was “good news for big tech”. “Apple also gets a nice win because the ruling forces Google to renegotiate the search deal annually,” he said on X. Judge Mehta’s ruling “doesn’t seem to be as draconian as the market was expecting,” said Melissa Otto, head of research at S&P Global Visible Alpha.

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