00:00Google has escaped a breakup of its Chrome browser in a major US competition case,
00:07but the judge imposed remedies whose impact remains uncertain just as AI starts to compete with search engines.
00:14Here is what we know about how the antitrust ruling could affect the company,
00:18the wider tech sector, and ordinary users of the giant's services.
00:30Judge Amit Mehta, who found a year ago that Google illegally maintained monopolies in online search,
00:36did not order the company to sell off its widely used Chrome browser in his Tuesday ruling.
00:41Neither did he halt Google's agreements with companies like iPhone maker Apple or Firefox browser developer Mozilla,
00:48under which it pays them to make Google their default search engine.
00:52Instead, he ordered remedies, including requirements to share data with other firms,
00:57so they could develop their own search products,
01:00and barring exclusive deals to make Google the only search engine on a device or service.
01:06The ruling was far milder than feared.
01:09It removes a significant legal overhang and signals that the court is willing to pursue pragmatic remedies,
01:14Hargreaves Lansdowne analyst Matt Britzman commented.
01:18Google chiefs nevertheless still disagree strongly with the court's initial decision in August 2024.
01:25The company's vice president of regulatory affairs, Leanne Mulholland, said in a blog post,
01:31hinting at a likely appeal that could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
01:36Stock in Google parent company Alphabet surged on Wednesday as investors welcomed the ruling.
01:42Meta himself noted that the landscape has changed since the U.S. Justice Department,
01:54and 11 states launched their antitrust case against Google in 2020.
01:59The emergence of generative artificial intelligence as a challenge to traditional search gives.
02:04The court hoped that Google will not simply outbid competitors for distribution if superior products emerge,
02:10he wrote in his ruling.
02:12Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want, Google's Mulholland agreed.
02:17Others in the sector were unhappy with the ruling.
02:20Google will still be allowed to continue to use its monopoly to hold back competitors,
02:25including an AI search, said Gabriel Weinberg,
02:28chief executive of privacy-conscious search engine DuckDuckGo.
02:32Beyond Google, observers have pointed out that Apple and Mozilla are both big winners from the decision.
02:37Ending tie-ups like theirs with Google would
02:39"...impose substantial, in some cases crippling, downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers,"
02:48Meta wrote.
02:49This is a huge win for Apple, but perhaps even more so for Mozilla,
02:54which may very well have died without the cash infusions,
02:57former Google Ventures investor M. G. Siegler wrote on his blog.
03:02In the near term, some search data will be shared by Google with competitors under the ruling,
03:16with Mulholland saying the company has
03:18"...concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy."
03:23Looking further ahead, Google Search is in the process of being disrupted by chatbots, Siegler said,
03:28"...a future where the company's flagship search product is completely displaced may yet be far off,"
03:33as Google Search notched up more than 85 billion individual visits in the month of March 2024,
03:39the most recent with data available from Statista.
03:42That compares with around 700 million weekly users reported by OpenAI for its ChatGPT chatbot,
03:49the biggest-named generative AI product.
03:51What's more, Google is not barred from entering into the same kinds of distribution deals
03:56as it struck for online search to place its own AI products on partner devices or services.
04:02The company already reports 450 million monthly users for its Gemini Chatbot app
04:07and offers competitive tools in other areas like video generation.
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