US Court Lets Google Keep Chrome

What Changed

In August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court in Washington ruled that Google had illegally monopolized online search, chiefly by paying device makers and browser developers to make it the default search engine. The payments to Apple alone run to about $20 billion a year.¹ The Justice Department asked for remedies that included selling Chrome.

On September 2, 2025, Mehta declined. "Google will not be required to divest Chrome," he wrote, adding that the government had overreached in seeking the sale of assets Google hadn't used to restrain competition illegally.² Google can keep paying partners such as Apple for prominent placement.² But he barred it from exclusive contracts for distributing Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app, ordered it to make some search index and user-interaction data available to rivals, and required it to offer search and search ad syndication to them.³ Advertising data was left out of the data-sharing order, and a technical committee will oversee compliance for six years.²

He finalized the judgment in December 2025, and the data-sharing and syndication remedies are in effect while the case continues.¹ The Justice Department and 38 states cross-appealed in February 2026, still seeking a Chrome sale, and in May 2026 Google asked the appeals court in Washington to overturn the ruling. Oral arguments are expected in late 2026 or early 2027.¹

Why It Mattered

Chrome is the browser at the centre of the cookie story on this timeline: Google planned to remove third-party cookies from it, then kept them. A sale would have put that decision, and about two-thirds of the world's browsing, in the hands of a company with different incentives.⁴ Instead, the browser most cookie-based tracking still runs through stays with Google.

For marketers, the ruling keeps the status quo: cookies on in Chrome, and no new owner to change that soon. Its other effects reach search advertising indirectly, through rivals that may get better search data and the end of exclusive default deals.

It also completed a pattern. With the ad tech ruling, US courts have twice found Google a monopolist and twice declined to break it up, preferring rules on how it behaves.