A federal judge has ruled that he will not have to get rid of Chrome, his most popular browser, as a measure of punishment and repair within the historic antitrust case that his owner matrix, Alphabet, maintains with the United States government. The ruling, which has been announced on Tuesday, allows the company based in California to dodge one of the requests of the Department of Justice and a group of states, despite the fact that justice previously determined that the company had an illegal monopoly in the market for digital searches.
In its 230 -page ruling, magistrate Amit Mehta prohibits Google to establish exclusive contracts for its Google Search products, Chrome, Google Assistant and the application based on artificial gemini intelligence, as part of its solution to the monopoly that the company holds, valued in more than two billion dollars, in the searches sector. However, the sentence does not give rise to one of the most controversial demands of the requesting parties, which had required that the company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin would get rid of their star search engine, Chrome – by which the giant opening had shown interest -, and broke the direct link of Google with Android, the operating system developed by the company, and that the operating system developed by the company developed by the company They use more than 2.5 billion people worldwide.
“The plaintiffs exceeded when requesting the forced divestment of these key assets, which Google did not use to impose illegal restrictions,” says Mehta in the ruling on Tuesday. However, the judge determines that Google must share the search data with their competitors. In its ruling, although Google remains the dominant actor in online searches, the legal panorama changed during the case with the introduction of general artificial intelligence.
It is not the first time that this judge looks faces with the company of the Great G. In 2023, after a jury trial that lasted for ten weeks, Mehta determined that Google had violated the US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly with his online searches. “Google is a monopoly and has acted as such,” he wrote in the sentence at that time.
And it is that justice has already punished the technological giant on different occasions for its way of proceeding. In fact, this last sentence emanates from another resolution that took place in April of this year, when a judge from Alexandria (Virginia) told the company “the plaintiffs have shown that Google has deliberately incur collected
The plaintiffs of that time, again the Department of Justice and a group of states, who alleged a dominant position in digital advertising, demanded measures that correct this situation, among which was the request to divide the advertising business through divestments to foster competition. However, these should be reviewed and valued in another legal process, which has finally dismissed the most ambitious. To unlink your Android search engine and break the agreements with Apple and other companies so that their browsers use Google as a default search engine. “We do not agree with the Court’s decision in regards to our tools for editors. The editors have many options and choose Google because our advertising technological tools are simple, affordable and effective,”
This judicial battle dates back to the mandate of former Democratic president Joe Biden, who initiated a crusade against the monopolistic practices of large companies, especially technological ones. Although Google surveillance is not fought only in the United States. Europe has also put the magnifying glass on the way of proceeding with Google, to the point that Donald Trump, current Maximum President, has accused Brussels of acting in bad faith against his digital companies. In 2024, European Justice endorsed in its search engine its product comparison service, Google Shopping, in front of those of the competition.
