“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Amit Mehta concluded last year in a significant ruling against the company. It had acted illegally to maintain a dominant position in search, Mehta concluded, with a variety of tactics, chief among them spending tens of billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine in desktop and smartphone web browsers. Last week, following a May trial, he outlined what would be done about it: not very much at all, actually.

No forced spinoff of Chrome. No breakup of Google’s interdependent properties. No data-sharing from the company’s advertising business. Most surprising was the lack of prohibition on search-preference deals, a centerpiece of the ruling that would have been relatively straightforward to enforce. Instead, Google will be barred from “any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app” — a rule that does not affect search-default deals like the one Google has with Apple, on which the company spends $20 billion a year — and will “make available to Qualified Competitors certain search
index and user-interaction data” from “narrowed” datasets.

These are the sort of focused, toothless remedies that one might have expected before Mehta’s surprisingly strident ruling last year. But in its context, they come as a surprise, too, which Mehta acknowledges and tries to explain right away:

Much has changed........

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