Google: A monopoly past its prime?

Google has emerged from landmark anti-trust proceedings “surprisingly unscathed,” said in the Financial Times . A “damning” ruling last year declared that Google behaved like a monopoly after it “was found to have squeezed out rivals” by paying Apple billions to make Google the default search engine on the iPhone, “giving it exclusive access to billions of people.” Federal regulators were hoping that federal Judge Amit Mehta would throw the book at Google by forcing it to sell off its Chrome browser or Android operating system. But Mehta opted against breaking up Google or barring it “from paying other tech companies to make its search engine the default in their products.” Instead, Google will be forced only to “reveal some of its search engine data” to rivals, a technical sanction “m