Google will have to share data with competitors in the online search industry, a federal district judge ruled on Sept. 2.

At the same time, District Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected federal and state prosecutors’ request that Google be compelled to sell off its Chrome browser.

In March, the Justice Department and a coalition of 38 state attorneys general asked the court to force Google to sell Chrome and implement measures to dismantle the company’s internet search monopoly.

The Justice Department initially filed suit against Google in 2020, marking the largest U.S. tech antitrust case since its battle against Microsoft in the 1990s. The lawsuit alleged that Google used anticompetitive tactics to maintain its dominance, securing contracts that made it the default search engine on web browsers and smartphones.

Regulators said this dominant position permitted Google to manipulate its advertising auction system, boosting costs for advertisers while boosting the company’s own revenue.

Google has long held nearly 90 percent of the U.S. search market. The company attributes its dominance to superior service. It argues that users can easily switch search engines and that it still faces competition from Microsoft’s Bing and others.

The judge ruled in 2024 that Google was “a monopolist” and had violated Section 2 of the federal Sherman Antitrust Act. Its business activities “effectively ‘froze’ the search ecosystem, resulting in markets in which Google has ‘no true competitor,’” Mehta wrote in his new 226-page opinion in the consolidated cases of United States v. Google LLC and State of Colorado v. Google LLC.

Today, Mehta wrote, Google remains “the dominant firm in the relevant product markets.”

Despite this finding, Google will not be required to divest itself of Chrome, nor will the court require it to divest itself of the Android operating system in the court’s final judgment, Mehta said.

“[The government] overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints,” he wrote.

Because of the “number and complexity of the parties’ proposed remedies,” Mehta said he summarized what he called his “top-line determinations.”

The judge said Google will be barred from making or continuing any exclusive contract related to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and its Gemini artificial intelligence app.

Google will have to grant access to competitors to some of its search index and user-interaction data, but not its advertising-related data. Google will also have to offer competitors search and search text ad syndication services “to enable those firms to deliver high-quality search results and ads to compete with Google while they develop their own search technologies and capacity,” he said.

Google will not be forced to share “query-level data with advertisers or provide them with more access to such data” because prosecutors did not prove that such remedies would advance competition in the market for search text ads.

The company will be required to publicly disclose any material changes it makes to its ad auctions “to promote greater transparency in search text ads pricing and to prevent Google from increasing prices by secretly fine-tuning its ad auctions,” Mehta said.

Google will not be required to change its policies to offer website publishers greater choice in how Google uses their content. The company will not be prevented from paying business partners to make sure that its search engine is installed on most smartphones as the default option, he said.

“Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial—in some cases, crippling—downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban,” the judge said.

Mehta said a “Technical Committee” will be created to help the governments that brought the case to implement and enforce the court’s final judgment.

Bill Pan contributed to this report.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Sept. 2, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated Sept. 9, 2025.