Leah Nylen, Josh Sisco, and Davey Alba reporting for Bloomberg Law:

Alphabet Inc.’s Google will be required to share online search data with rivals while avoiding harsher penalties, including the forced sale of its Chrome business, a judge ruled in the biggest US antitrust case in almost three decades.

Tuesday’s ruling represents a blow to the government, falling far short of the most severe remedies sought by antitrust enforcers after the court found Google illegally monopolized the search market. Judge Amit Mehta said he will bar Google from entering into exclusive contracts for distribution but would still allow the search giant to pay its partners — a key win for Apple Inc., which has received roughly $20 billion a year for making Google search the default on iPhones.

This is probably the best outcome Google could have hoped for, considering the much more severe consequences they were facing. While they “have concerns” about the imposed limits, I doubt they’ll appeal—why expose themselves to potentially stiffer penalties? With this ruling, they’re largely status quo ante—they can still make billions of dollars by paying billions of dollars to remain the default search engine^[1] for Apple and others.

Despite that, I doubt the government will pursue this further. They got their antitrust ruling, if not all the remedies they sought. (Notably, Judge Mehta writes in his 230-page decision that the government “overreached in seeking forced divesture” of Chrome and Android.) Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater took a victory lap on X/Twitter, while writing that the DOJ is “weighing [their] options and thinking through whether the ordered relief goes far enough,”^[2] but I can’t see them risking a rollback, even with this very Trump friendly Supreme Court.^[3]

Apple is no doubt thrilled to maintain their $20 billion services revenue. I’ll bet the executives over at Mozilla are also popping champagne corks. The stock market was definitely pleased. Both Google and Apple were up substantially after the announcement—evidence of the insignificance of this ruling.