A US federal judge has ordered a major makeover of Google’s search engine in a crackdown aimed at addressing the damaging effects of monopolistic practices.
In an effort to curb Google’s influence, Washington DC Judge Amit Mehta has introduced new limitations on how the company directs traffic to its search engine.
He is requiring the tech giant to grant current and potential competitors access to key elements of its search engine, including the vast data collected from trillions of queries that enhance the quality of its results.
However, the judge rejected the government’s more ambitious bid to split up the company, and its attempt to compel the firm to sell its widely used Chrome web browser.
And it won’t have to sell mobile operating system Android.
He also stopped short of banning the multibillion-dollar deals that Google has been making for years to lock in its search engine as the default on smartphones, personal computers, and other devices.
Those deals, involving payments of more than $26bn (£19.4bn) annually, were central to a nearly five-year-old antitrust case brought by the US Justice Department.
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The 226-page ruling by US District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington DC is still expected to have far-reaching effects on the tech industry, which is being transformed by advances in artificial intelligence.
Platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are challenging Google‘s dominant role as the internet’s main gateway.
