Google will be allowed to hold on to its Chrome browser and Android businesses after a US judge rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to break up the tech giant, opting instead for more limited restrictions.

In his more than 200-page decision, Washington D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta agreed with the US government that Google should face some constraints on its power and reach, but stopped short of ordering the tech company to spin off into separate entities.

Rather, in an attempt to curb Google’s perceived monopoly of online search, the firm must make smaller but still consequential changes. 

Among the most notable, Mehta ordered Google to share search engine data with competitors and placed a prohibition on the firm signing contracts that see its products exclusively preloaded on devices.

However, the ruling also said that a complete prohibition on Google’s ‘self-preferencing’ of its genAI technologies, like Gemini, would go too far. 

In his decision, Mehta said that the court would not ‘hobble Google’s competitiveness’ by banning the company from striking any deals with distributors, saying ‘that is precisely how the emerging—and highly competitive—genAI marketplace operates’.  

Overall, the ruling was mostly in Google’s favour, with the judge describing the US Government’s attempt to force its break-up as an ‘overreach.’ However, in a statement, the firm said that it had concerns about how the newly imposed requirements ‘will impact our users and their privacy.’

“Today’s decision recognises how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information. This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want,” said Google.

The lenient ruling will come as some relief to Google, especially given Mehta’s earlier decision last year, in which he agreed with the DOJ and ruled that the company had illegally exploited its search dominance to crush its competitors. 

While this latest ruling will come as a blow to the Government, others are equally as furious at what they perceive as an unexpected U-turn by the judge.

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The non-profit, non-partisan American Economic Liberties Project, which works to oppose what it considers to be an excess concentration of corporate power, described the ruling as a ‘feckless remedy’ to a case of storied monopolisation.

“You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot,” said Nidhi Hegde, the organisation’s executive director.

“Similarly, you don’t find Google liable for monopolisation and then write a remedy that lets it protect its monopoly. The Court found Google liable for maintaining one of the most consequential and damaging monopolies of the internet era, yet has bizarrely decided to leave its power almost fully intact.”

Despite that, Google’s day in court could be the light at the end of the tunnel for other Big Tech firms, with Meta most notably awaiting a decision in its own recent antitrust trial, brought by the US Federal Trade Commission in an attempt to force a break-up of the firm after its acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram.