A U.S. federal judge has saved

Google LLC

from a breakup but delivered other orders intended to remedy the

tech giant

’s monopoly over the online search market.

In a Tuesday court filing, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta allowed Google to keep its Chrome internet browser and its Android operating system, but ruled that it will be required to share parts of its search data with competitors and restricted it from paying companies to be the exclusive search engine featured on web browsers and smartphones.

The final remedies fell short of the penalties that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) had sought, which included Google’s divestiture of Chrome and for the tech giant to provide broader swathes of its search data to competitors.

“(The) plaintiffs have not met their heavy burden to warrant the ‘radical structural’ remedy of a forced divestiture of Chrome. Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divestiture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints,” Mehta wrote on Tuesday.

The company also won’t be barred from paying companies for “preloading or placement of Google Search, Chrome, or its GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) products,” Mehta said, arguing that cutting off those payments would inflict “substantial” downstream harms to partners and consumers. It will have to provide certain search index and user-interaction data, but not ads data, to “qualified competitors… (which) will promote competition,” he added.

In a landmark judgement last August, Mehta ruled that Google had violated U.S. antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly over online search. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” he said at the time. For over a decade, Google had paid companies such as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. over US$26 billion to ensure that its search engine was the default option shown on their devices and browsers, which the federal judge deemed illegal and anti-competitive.

Mehta’s 230-page ruling on Tuesday addressed the changing online search market and the growing influence of AI in the space. The emergence of GenAI “changed the course of this case. These remedies proceedings thus have been as much about promoting competition among general search engine (providers) as ensuring that Google’s dominance in search does not carry over into the GenAI space,” he said.

Google has said it plans to appeal the original ruling. “We … strongly believe the Court’s original decision was wrong, and look forward to our eventual appeal,” the company wrote on X on Saturday.

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The internet and search giant is facing a separate antitrust trial initiated by the DOJ in 2023 over its ad tech business. The remedies portion of that trial is slated for later in September.

Shares of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, rose more than six per cent in after-hours trading on the news.

• Email: ylau@postmedia.com