Topline
Shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, rose sharply in premarket trading early on Wednesday, after a federal judge ruled that the company does not need to be broken up or be forced to sell its popular Chrome web browser to remedy its search market monopoly.
In premarket trading early on Wednesday, Alphabet’s shares rose to $223.50, up nearly 5.4% from Tuesday’s close.
The positive market reaction comes after Google avoided the harshest potential penalties in the federal antitrust case and was only ordered to share its search and user-interaction data with “Qualified Competitors.”
Apple’s shares also rose 3.9% to $238.6 in the premarket after federal judge Amit P. Mehta’s ruling allowed Google to keep paying the iPhone-maker around $20 billion to remain the default search engine on Apple devices.
Mehta, however, banned Google from entering into exclusive contracts “relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app.”
In a statement issued shortly after the ruling, Google said the 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.” The company, however, expressed concerns about the judge’s decision to impose “limits on how we distribute Google services” and “share Search data with rivals,” saying: “We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and we’re reviewing the decision closely.”
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, who has been involved with antitrust fights with Google, criticized the ruling on X, saying: “It's like a defendant robbed a series of banks and the court verdict found them guilty, then sentenced them to probation under which they may continue robbing banks but must share data on how they rob banks with competing bank robbers.”