On Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025, a federal judge ruled that Google would not be forced to sell Chrome, their popular web browser. This ruling comes after the government brought up concerns about the tech giant having an illegal monopoly over online search.
Judge Amit P. Mehta did, however, rule that Google must share some search data with competitors under specific protections, much to Google’s discontent. Google plans to appeal this decision.
What Does This Ruling Mean For Google?
Tuesday’s ruling by Judge Amit P. Mehta is primarily favorable for Google, especially considering that the company has already lost two antitrust cases this year.
Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said “Today’s decision recognizes 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. That’s why we disagree so strongly with the Court’s initial decision in August 2024 on liability.”
Mulholland is referencing the August 2024 ruling that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in general search and related text ads.
The relief ordered by the court on Tuesday bars Google from entering into exclusive agreements to prioritize placing or preloading its search engine, browser or AI chatbot to other apps, licenses, or revenue-share arrangements. So, what does this mean? This ruling will make it so that Google will have to abandon agreements that make it the exclusive default search engine on browsers like Apple’s Safari. While this ruling may slightly level the playing field as far as increasing the usage rate of other search engines like Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo, Google’s search engine will still be the by-far-and-away most popular search engine for the foreseeable future. According to Statcounter, Google currently owns 89.83% of the worldwide search engine market share, while Bing owns just 3.95% of the market share and DuckDuckGo owns just 0.9%. For business owners, this ruling will not change much (yet). Google will continue to be the dominant search engine that companies should focus the majority of their SEO and SEM efforts on.
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If you have any additional questions about Google, search engine optimization, or pay-per-click advertising, please don’t hesitate to contact our team at Boston Web Marketing today. Our SEO specialists help businesses in almost every industry achieve higher search results! Give us a call today at (857) 526-0096 or fill out the contact form on our website, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.