A US judge has imposed limits on Google’s search business, according to the latest court filings in the antitrust case.
Google’s longstanding battle with the Department of Justice (DOJ) came to a head last year when US District Judge Amit Mehta found the tech giant to hold an illegal monopoly in search and search advertising.
Following the ruling, the DOJ had argued for stronger remedies including the potential sale of its Chrome browser, which Mehta deemed a “poor fit for this case”.
Instead the Alphabet-owned company was ordered to open up access to search data for competing firms and revise its handling of key commercial agreements.
The latest document places a set of restrictions on Google, including no longer entering into long-term default search agreements.
Mehta wrote in the filings on Friday: “The age-old saying ‘the devil is in the details’ may not have been devised with the drafting of an antitrust remedies judgment in mind, but it sure does fit.”
The tech giant paid more than $26bn for such deals with Apple, Mozilla and others in 2021.
Under the limitations, such contracts are to be capped at one year.
The same restrictions apply across Google’s wider business and covers any agreements involving generative AI products and any “application, software, service, feature, tool, functionality, or product”, built on large language models.
GenAI “plays a significant role in these remedies,” Mehta added.
The judge also included requirements on who should be in the technical committee, which will determine with whom Google is to share its search data with.
“Members shall be experts in some combination of software engineering, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, economics, behavioural science, and data privacy and data security,” he wrote in the filings.
Mehta emphasised that committee members must not have worked for Google or any of its competitors in the six months prior to serving in the role and it must have access to “Google’s source code and algorithms, subject to a confidentiality agreement”.
SBC News has approached Google for a comment.
This is not the only antitrust trial Google is facing: in April the court ruled the tech firm has an illegal monopoly in adtech when it tied two its tools together.
US District Court Judge Leonie Brikema is yet to give her verdict on the remedies, but has questions whether a break-up of Google’s adtech business is the best solution to restore competition.