Originally published at: Google Allowed to Keep Chrome and Continue Paying Apple $20 Billion for Search Placement - TidBITS
After years of legal proceedings, the Google antitrust case has finally resulted in a ruling with real-world impact—though perhaps not in the way many expected. Rather than forcing dramatic changes, the ruling preserves key aspects of how users currently engage with Google’s products. In a highly readable 230-page PDF, Judge Amit Mehta writes:
Last year, this court ruled that Defendant Google LLC had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” The court found that, for more than a decade, Google had entered into distribution agreements with browser developers, original equipment manufacturers, and wireless carriers to be the out-of-the box, default general search engine (“GSE”) at key search access points.
According to The Verge, the remedies ruling opens the door for Google to appeal Mehta’s finding that the company has acted as an illegal monopoly, a process that could take years and end up in the Supreme Court. While that legal battle plays out in the background, the ruling’s immediate impact on Apple users comes from two key decisions that maintain the status quo.
First, Google won’t be required to divest itself of the Chrome browser, rendering moot Perplexity’s ridiculous $34.5 billion purchase offer. That seems like a win for users, given that Google maintains Chromium—the open source engine that powers Chrome and serves as the foundation for numerous third-party browsers, such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, The Browser Company’s Arc and Dia, Vivaldi, and Perplexity’s own Comet. The vibrant ecosystem of third-party browsers built on Chromium speaks to its successful management.
Second, Google can continue to make payments to distribution partners—read, Apple and Mozilla—for “preloading or placement of Google Search, Chrome, or its GenAI products.” The judge said that forbidding this would impose “substantial—and in some cases, crippling—downstream harms.” In other words, the Apple/Google deal that sends most Safari searches to Google in exchange for $20 billion in annual payments can continue unimpeded. Apple is undoubtedly overjoyed with that decision since $20 billion is a significant portion of Apple’s increasingly important Services revenue.
I’m almost a little sad that the search placement deal was allowed to stand, mainly because I’m curious about what Apple would have come up with as an alternative. The easiest and most profitable route would have been for Apple to switch to Microsoft’s Bing, but it would have been more interesting to see Apple take the opportunity to develop its own search engine. Then again, it has always been more effective to search Apple’s website using Google than the site’s own search engine, so perhaps that’s just a pipe dream.
Beyond preserving much of Google’s status quo, the ruling breaks new ground by focusing on the massive shift to generative AI in the past year.
Much has changed since the end of the liability trial, though some things have not. Google is still the dominant firm in the relevant product markets. No existing rival has wrested market share from Google. And no new competitor has entered the market. But artificial intelligence technologies, particularly generative AI (“GenAI”), may yet prove to be game changers. Today, tens of millions of people use GenAI chatbots, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, to gather information that they previously sought through internet search. These GenAI chatbots are not yet close to replacing GSEs, but the industry expects that developers will continue to add features to GenAI products to perform more like GSEs.
The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case. No witness at the liability trial testified that GenAI products posed a near-term threat to GSEs. The very first witness at the remedies hearing, by contrast, placed GenAI front and center as a nascent competitive threat. These remedies proceedings thus have been as much about promoting competition among GSEs as ensuring that Google’s dominance in search does not carry over into the GenAI space. Many of Plaintiffs’ proposed remedies are crafted with that latter objective in mind.
The Findings of Fact section provides a detailed analysis of generative AI, LLMs, and their potential impact on traditional search engines. It includes an overview of the key players in the generative AI market, describing Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and even xAI. Notably absent from that list is Apple, and Apple Intelligence is mentioned only once, in reference to how Apple is integrating ChatGPT and OpenAI technology in exchange for revenue share payments.
