Google Ruling Shows Antitrust's Struggle to Match Tech Market

U.S. antitrust enforcers have spent years strategizing how to bring lawsuits against the nation's biggest tech companies, with the goal of restraining their power and promoting competition.

- Dave Michaels & Katherine Blunt

Tuesday's ruling imposing light penalties on Google highlights fundamental challenges with that approach, even when a judge finds a company has engaged in illegal monopolization.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta last year issued a landmark ruling that Google, whose parent is Alphabet, illegally maintained its search monopoly by entering distribution deals that boxed out competitors. The decision raised hopes among the company's rivals that the judge would check its power by breaking it up or requiring widespread changes to how it operates.

But after a second-phase trial on remedies this year, Mehta on Tuesday said he wouldn't force sweeping changes at Google because the market had changed significantly since the Justice Department sued in 2020, and even since his ruling last year.

The judge, a nominee of President Barack Obama, ordered Google to share some of its search data and barred the company from striking deals that exclude Google's search-engine rivals on devices and browsers. But he rejected a host of more-stringent proposals offered by the Justice Department, including a forced spinoff of the Chrome browser, siding with Google's argument that a light touch was the better approach.

The decision was seen as a best-case outcome for Google, as well as Apple, which had billions of dollars on the line.

"Our antitrust law is focused on harm and not power," said Daniel Francis, an antitrust expert at New York University School of Law. "It's not a good tool for general deconcentration of markets or breaking up monopolies unless they were acquired with illegal conduct."

The case was the federal government's first marquee monopolization case in a generation. The mixed outcome raises warning signs for other cases the federal government has brought against tech giants.