Landmark ruling: Judge blocks Google breakup but forces search overhaul in latest order– What it says

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a major restructuring of Google’s search engine in an effort to curb what he described as the corrosive power of an illegal monopoly , but stopped short of breaking up the tech giant.

US district Judge Amit Mehta, in Washington, DC, issued a 226-page ruling aimed at restraining some of Google’s tactics used to drive traffic to its search engine and other services.

The judge ordered Google to give both current and potential competitors access to some of its proprietary search data — the information collected from trillions of queries that helps improve the accuracy and quality of its search results.

However, Mehta rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s request to force Google to sell its popular Chrome browser and declined to ban the multi-billion-dollar agreements that secure Google as the default search engine on smartphones, personal computers, and other devices. These deals, which bring in more than $26 billion annually, were a central point in the nearly five-year-old antitrust case.

The ruling comes at a time when the tech industry is being reshaped by artificial intelligence innovations, including conversational “answer engines” from companies like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which are challenging Google’s dominance as the primary gateway to the internet.

While the judge stopped short of a breakup, the decision signals a significant regulatory intervention in one of the world’s largest technology companies, balancing efforts to foster competition with concerns about disrupting a key player in the global digital economy.