The court ruled that Google's default search contract term has been shortened to one year, and must be renegotiated annually to ensure fair competition in the market.
Following the exemption from selling the Chrome browser, this new ruling breaks long-standing exclusive agreements with companies like Apple for search services, forcing data sharing to narrow the scale gap.

In response to the US Department of Justice's lawsuit against GoogleAntitrust lawsuitFederal Judge Amit Mehta had earlier ruled on the remedy.Further expand the rulingThe ruling stipulated that Google's future contracts with device manufacturers to set its search and AI services as default settings would be strictly limited to one year.

Forced annual renegotiation to break long-term lock-in

This ruling means that Google must renegotiate these contracts, which used to be signed for many years, every year. The most famous example is the huge multi-year agreement with Apple to make Google Search the default search engine on the iPhone.

Judge Amit Mehta argued that by limiting the contract to one year, Google would be forced to return to the negotiating table periodically, creating a more level playing field for competitors such as Microsoft's Bing Search or DuckDuckGo, and giving other companies more opportunities to compete for default search slots.

Chrome will be free, but you must share your data.

This is the latest development following the September ruling by a judge that Google does not need to sell its Chrome browser business. At that time, the judge rejected the U.S. Supreme Court's radical proposal to break up the Chrome browser business by the end of 2024, and instead sought to address the antitrust issue through conduct remedies.

The case stems from a ruling last fall, in which the court found that Google illegally maintained its monopoly on internet search by paying billions of dollars to companies like Apple in exchange for default search privileges and by entering into exclusive distribution agreements for Google Search, Chrome, and Gemini.

In addition to shortening the contract duration, Judge Amit Mehta's September ruling also terminated these exclusive agreements and mandated that Google share some search data with its competitors. This move aims to narrow the "scale gap" created by Google's long-standing monopoly, allowing other search engines to optimize their algorithms and service quality by acquiring more data.