Google will not be forced to sell its Chrome browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday in the tech giant’s ongoing legal battle over being ruled a monopoly last year.
The company will be barred from certain exclusive deals with device makers and must share data from its search engine with competitors, the judge ruled.
Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling follows months of speculation surrounding what penalties Google would face as a result of his decision last year that the company violated antitrust laws as it built what he called an online search monopoly. The ruling, one of the most significant antitrust cases in decades, resulted in an additional hearing in April to determine what actions the government should take as a remedy.
Mehta’s decision to allow Google to keep Chrome represents a more lenient outcome for the company than what federal prosecutors requested: force the tech giant sell off its marquee search product and to ban it from entering the browser market for five years. In his 230-page ruling, Mehta stated that prosecutors “overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets”.
Although Google escaped the most serious consequences of its antitrust violations, Mehta’s ruling sided with prosecutors in barring the company from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts relating to the distribution of its products including Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app. The ruling does not bar Google from making any payments to distributors, however, stating that a broad payment ban would create downstream harms.
Google’s shares rose in after-hours trading following Mehta’s decision, a sign that investors believe the outcome favorable to Google.