Google (GOOG, GOOGL) won’t be forced to sell Chrome after a federal district judge ruled divestment a “poor fit” in a landmark antitrust case, but it will have to share data that helped it hold on to its search monopoly.
The ruling from District of Columbia judge Amit Mehta sent Google’s stock higher by almost 6% in premarket trading on Wednesday.
As part of the decision, Mehta ruled that Google can continue to make payments to “distribution partners for preloading or placement of Google Search, Chrome, or GenAI products.” That allows for Google to continue to make its $20 billion per year payments to Apple (AAPL) in exchange for the iPhone maker using Google Search as the default search engine in its Safari browser and Siri.
Apple stock rose almost 3%.
The Justice Department had pushed for a forced sale of the company’s search business, and for the judge to order an end to multibillion-dollar contracts that have all but assured Google’s market dominance, moves the judge denied to make.
“Plaintiffs have not shown that their behavioral remedies will be ineffective without the immediate divestiture of Chrome,” Mehta said.
The court’s task, Mehta said, is to discern between conduct that maintains a monopoly through anticompetitive acts as distinct from conduct that fuels a monopoly’s growth as a consequence of a superior product.
“After two complete trials, this court cannot find that Google’s market dominance is sufficiently attributable to its illegal conduct to justify divestiture,” the judge said of Chrome, adding that such “radical structural relief” would require a more heightened causal connection.
Judge Mehta also declined to grant the DOJ’s request for a contingent divestment of Google’s Android operating system, writing that the government “did not present any evidence to justify a contingent structural remedy.”
Throughout the decision, the judge noted the rise of search competition posed by generative AI, which he said presents “strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work.”
While Google will be able to keep Chrome and Android, as well as continue making payments to distribution partners, the company also has to make a number of changes.
The search giant is barred from entering exclusive contracts related to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini. Google also can’t condition the licensing of its Play Store or any other Google app on the distribution or preloading of other Google services or condition receiving revenue-sharing payments from one Google app on the placement of another app.
Google will also be required to provide “Qualified Competitors” with certain search index and user-interaction data, as well as search and search text ads syndication services.
The decision is one of two major antitrust lawsuits that Google lost to the Justice Department and US states in the past year.
The DOJ and a group of states prevailed over Google in August last year in two consolidated cases that alleged the tech giant abused its dominance in online search.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his ruling on the antitrust claims.
Google was defeated by the DOJ and 35 states, along with Guam, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, in another antitrust case decided in April. That case, which alleged that Google unfairly held on to its market dominance in search engine advertising and search engine text advertising, is pending in Alexandria, Va., and set to begin its remedies phase in September.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, said in a response to the decision that, because competition for the way people find information remains intense, Google continues to strongly disagree with the court’s decision to hold it liable for monopolizing search.
“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,” Mulholland said.
The search giant argued at trial that it gained its search dominance not by securing exclusive contracts, but by offering “the best” search engine on the market. Google claimed that despite holding monopolies in the search markets, its contracts neither violated antitrust laws nor harmed competition.
The judge’s ruling in that case also held that Google violated antitrust law in the market for “general search text” ads, which appear at the top of search results pages.
For Google, the judge’s decision affects a huge profit engine. In 2024, Google’s search engine advertising business generated more than $198 billion in revenue, accounting for 56.6% of its parent company, Alphabet’s, total revenue.
The figure handily exceeds Google’s search engine advertising revenue in 2023, which totaled $175 billion, despite its antitrust defeat and a shift in online searches to artificial intelligence-based chatbots.
As of June 2023, Google controlled 91% of the global search engine market across all computing platforms, and 87% in the US, according to Statcounter. On mobile, Google’s market share was even higher at 95%.
More recent data from Statcounter from July 2025 showed Google’s global share of the search engine market dropped to 89.5%, dipping below 90% for the first time since 2015. Statcounter does not benchmark traditional search engine traffic against newer search techniques using chatbots. According to the data, Google ceded traffic to traditional search engine competitors Bing and Yandex.
The judge’s decision in the search case came after a two-month trial in 2023 that included testimony from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as executives from search market rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and DuckDuckGo.
The DOJ and states’ claims were handled together because of their nearly identical allegations that said Google held on to its monopoly by paying companies like Apple, Amazon, and Mozilla to make Google the default search provider on mobile phones, tablets, and browsers.
At the time of the lawsuit, Google held a 90% share in online search.
Google’s disputed behavior revolves around contracts it entered with manufacturers of computer devices and mobile devices, as well as with browser services, browser developers, and wireless carriers.
These contracts, the government claimed, violated antitrust laws because they made Google the mandatory default search provider.
Companies that agreed to those exclusive contracts have included Apple, LG, Samsung, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Mozilla. Those deals are why smartphones from manufacturers including Samsung, one of the world’s largest smartphone makers, come preloaded with Google’s various apps.
Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed.
Got a tip? Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X at @DanielHowley.
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