It was billed as the first major anti-monopoly judgment of the internet age – one that raised the prospect that Google’s parent company Alphabet could be broken up.

Instead, the tech giant emerged almost unscathed.

Last year, US Federal Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google, having spent billions of dollars to lock in exclusive deals to maintain an illegal dominance of online search, was a monopolist.

Having been declared a monopolist by a court last year, Google faced a break-up. Instead, it emerged virtually unscathed.Credit: AP

This week, he announced his remedies: the tech giant will no longer to be able to pay for exclusive deals for other companies to carry its products, including its AI chatbot, Gemini, and it will have to provide its competitors with a limited amount of its search engine data.

That falls well short of what the US Justice Department had called for. It wanted Google to be forced to divest its dominant Chrome browser and perhaps its Android operating system, terminate exclusive deals with companies like Apple to use its search engine as their default browser, and open up its vast trove of user data to its competitors.

The case, which started in 2020, was the first of a string of antitrust cases launched by the Trump and Biden administrations against the mega tech companies. It was seen as the most important one since a 1998 action against Microsoft, which had been accused of illegally monopolising the web browser market.

‘The emergence of [generative AI] changed the course of this case.’

Microsoft lost the initial case, but overturned the judgment on appeal. In the meantime, Google was emerging as a more innovative rival, with a better product and in an environment where the settlement of the case made the industry landscape more open to competitors.

Mehta may be hoping history repeats.

While he did find in his judgment last year that Google had acted illegally,........

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