Google will not be forced to sell Chrome – but it has work to do

A judge has ruled that Google will not have to sell its Chrome browser after the Department of Justice proposed this last year. But as part of the ruling, the court says that the company will have to change some things about the way it operates.

The short version is that Google will no longer be allowed to make exclusivity deals relating to search, Google Assistant, Gemini, or Chrome. In the ruling, Judge Amit Mehta said that the US government has “overreached” when pushing for Chrome to be sold off.

In a lengthy report, Judge Mehta writes: “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. Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints."

Google will obviously be pleased at being able to hang onto Chrome without a fight, but there is much for the company to take umbrage with. The court ruled that Google will have to share search data with its rivals in order to “narrow the scale gap created by Google’s exclusive distribution agreements and, in turn, the quality gap that followed”.

The highlights from the ruling are:

• Google will be barred from entering or maintaining any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app. Google shall not enter or maintain any agreement that (1) conditions the licensing of the Play Store or any other Google application on the distribution, preloading, or placement of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini app anywhere on a device; (2) conditions the receipt of revenue share payments for the placement of one Google application (e.g., Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini app) on the placement of another such application; (3) conditions the receipt of revenue share payments on maintaining Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini app on any device, browser, or search access point for more than one year; or (4) prohibits any partner from simultaneously distributing any other GSE, browser, or GenAI product.
• 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. Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.
• Google will not be barred from making payments or offering other consideration to distribution partners for preloading or placement of Google Search, Chrome, or its GenAI products. Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial—in some cases, crippling— downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban.
• Google will have to make available to Qualified Competitors certain search index and user-interaction data, though not ads data, as such sharing will deny Google the fruits of its exclusionary acts and promote competition. The court, however, has narrowed the datasets Google will be required to share to tailor the remedy to its anticompetitive conduct.
• Google shall offer Qualified Competitors search and search text ads syndication services to enable those firms to deliver high-quality search results and ads to compete with Google while they develop their own search technologies and capacity. Such syndication, however, shall occur largely on ordinary commercial terms that are consistent with Google’s current syndication services.
• Google will not have to present users with choice screens on its products or encourage its Android distribution partners to do the same. Precedent requires courts to avoid remedies that compel product design requirements, and in any event, choice screens have not been shown to enhance competition among GSEs.
• Google will not be required to share granular, query-level data with advertisers or provide them with more access to such data. Nor will it have to restore an “exact match” keyword bidding option. Plaintiffs did not establish that these remedies would promote competition in the search text ads market.
• Google will be compelled to publicly disclose material changes it makes to its ad auctions to promote greater transparency in search text ads pricing and to prevent Google from increasing prices by secretly fine-tuning its ad auctions.
• Google will not have to underwrite a nationwide public education campaign. That remedy does not fit Google’s violations and its terms are too indefinite.
• Google will not have to modify its policies to offer website publishers more choice in how Google uses their content. This remedy bears no relationship to Google’s unlawful acts and is an improper demand to implement overly regulatory requirements.
• Google will not be subject to an investment reporting requirement. It, too, bears no relationship to Google’s anticompetitive conduct.
• Google will not be subject to anti-retaliation, anti-circumvention, or selfpreferencing provisions. The first two restrictions are too vague and do not comport with the requirements of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(d). There is no legal or factual basis for the last.

Google has issued a statement about the court’s decision:

[The] decision recognizes how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information. This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want. That’s why we disagree so strongly with the Court’s initial decision in August 2024 on liability.

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.

As always, we’re continuing to focus on what matters — building innovative products that people choose and love.

The statement suggests, without explicitly saying, that Google is not done with this case. The mentioning of privacy concerns would point to the company returning to court to fight the requirement to share search data with competitors.

You can read through the full text of the ruling (230 pages) here.