The judge presiding over the antitrust case between Google and the U.S. Department of Justice says Google won’t be barred from entering into search agreements with companies like Apple, reports Bloomberg.
“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,” he said.
Google is specifically allowed to make payments and offer “other consideration” to distribution partners for the preloading or placement of Google Search, Chrome, and Gemini. However, the company can’t enter into exclusive contracts for search engine distribution, but it is still allowed to pay to Apple to be a search engine option on the iPhone, the ruling notes.
This is the latest development in the Google antitrust legal brouhaha. On Aug. 5, 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that Google had illegally monopolized the search market, “handing the government an epic win in its first major antitrust case against a tech giant in more than two decades. He said that the Alphabet unit’s US$26 billion in payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market.
Mehta said that Google’s agreements with Apple and other smartphone makers have a “significant effect” maintaining Google’s search monopoly, keeping other search engines from competing and reinforcing Google’s dominant position.
A 2023 New York Times report said Google paid Apple “around $18 billion” in 2021 to be the default search engine in Safari on Macs, iPads, and iPhones. The terms and effects of Apple’s deal with Google have become the centerpiece of the US v. Google trial.
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