STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
A federal judge in Washington will not order the breakup of Google in an antitrust case brought by the Department of Justice. Google still faces some other penalties intended to make sure that it cannot monopolize the search engine market. We will note that Google is a financial supporter of NPR and we cover it like any other company, which is what NPR's Jaclyn Diaz is doing for us. Good morning.
JACLYN DIAZ, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: OK. So there was so much concern about Google overly dominating the search engine market. People were saying, we got to break up Google. What is the judge doing instead?
DIAZ: Google avoided the harshest penalty that the Department of Justice was asking for. That would have been the spin-off of its popular web browser, Chrome. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said that would have been incredibly messy and highly risky, but he did order some changes. This antitrust case began in 2020, when the Justice Department sued Google over the exclusive deals it made with companies like Apple and Samsung to ensure that Google Search had a primary spot on mobile devices. The DOJ argued that those deals cut competitors out.
In 2024, the judge agreed that Google had a monopoly, and now he's decided the penalties. In his ruling, the judge allowed Google to keep paying device makers to preload its products, and that means giving Google's search engine or other apps a top prime position on those brand-new phones or tablets. The judge says those deals just can't be exclusive. Instead, the biggest action he took was ordering Google to share some of its search data. So that could be what users are literally searching for or what results you click on after searching, and that's going to be shared with competitors. That is a huge collection of our information. But he spared Google from having to share advertising data.
INSKEEP: OK. So this is very interesting because Google and a lot of other companies are gathering information on us all the time, and it's extremely profitable information. What could rivals do if Google has to share what it knows?
DIAZ: That's right. So the biggest thing is that data on things like user click data and search queries could help smaller competitors build their own search engines to compete with Google. AI developers could also use this information to help train large language models - and that's, like, chatbots - so that they can generate better, human-like responses. And in court, the DOJ had argued that sharing this data would prevent Google from turning its monopoly in online search into a monopoly on AI. But Google argued that there's plenty of competition in the AI space, and Judge Mehta agreed.
INSKEEP: So what are the parties to this case saying about it?
DIAZ: So the head of the DOJ's Antitrust Division, Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater, said Mehta's ruling restores competition to the search engine market, but that the agency would consider its next steps. In writing on the company's website, Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, expressed relief that the judge did not order a sell-off of Chrome, as you can imagine. She said it would have harmed consumers and our partners. But she said Google still has concerns about sharing search data, mainly over how it will impact users and their privacy.
INSKEEP: What are outsiders saying about this?
DIAZ: So Sam Weinstein is a professor at Yeshiva University who studies antitrust law. And he said, overall, it seemed like Judge Mehta really tried to have a gentle hand.
SAM WEINSTEIN: I think overall, I would say it's very conservative, not in a political sense but in a legal sense.
DIAZ: But this ruling, it's safe to say, was very complex, and it may take a while before the implications are clear for Google's competitors in both search and AI. And in a statement, one of Google's competitors, DuckDuckGo's founder and CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, said these remedies don't go far enough to encourage competition. And he even called on Congress to step in and to level the playing field.
INSKEEP: NPR's Jaclyn Diaz, thanks for your insights.
DIAZ: Thank you.
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