Google not compelled to sell Chrome and Android by US court
In a recent ruling in Washington, Judge Amit Mehta decided that internet giant Google would not be forced to separate its web browser Chrome and mobile operating system Android. However, the ruling does impose certain restrictions on Google's business practices.
The US government, in its attempt to break up Google, argued that the company's dominance in the search engine market was anti-competitive. The ruling, while not breaking up Google, does require the tech giant to share some data from its search engine with competitors. This data includes parts of the search engine index that Google creates as it crawls the internet, as well as some information about user interactions.
The decision is a partial success for the government, according to Jonathan Kanter, previously responsible for competition policy at the US Department of Justice. Google's rival search engines, such as Microsoft's Bing and DuckDuckGo, as well as AI companies like OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and Perplexity, stand to benefit from this shared data.
For Mozilla, the pre-installation of Google Search in the Firefox browser is a major source of income. Google will still be able to pay other companies like Apple or Mozilla to pre-install or prominently feature its services. This means that Mozilla's income stream remains intact, and Apple's services sector, which includes revenue from Google, also benefits. Apple reportedly receives billions of dollars for having Google Search pre-installed as the default on iPhones.
Google's parent company Alphabet's stock rose by 6.7 percent in after-hours trading following the court ruling, indicating a positive market response to the decision. Google has already announced its intention to appeal the ruling.
The ruling also addresses the rapidly growing business of artificial intelligence. Google will have to share some data with competitors, which could potentially help AI companies like Perplexity in developing their competing products. Perplexity had expressed interest in buying Chrome if courts ordered it to be spun off.
Investor Gene Munster commented on the ruling, stating "Nothing changes in the end." Google is concerned about the potential impact on data privacy of sharing search engine information as a result of the ruling. The search results do not provide information about the name of the US Justice Department official who recently advocated for the lawsuit against Google regarding anti-competitive practices.
As the US government considers its next steps after the ruling, the impact on the tech industry and competition remains to be seen.
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