Google ruling good news for tech industrypublished at 22:39 British Summer Time
22:39 BST
Lily Jamali
North America Technology Correspondent, reporting from San Francisco
The general consensus on Wall Street is that Tuesday’s ruling from Judge Amit Mehta is good news for Big Tech.
“The regulator’s bark is bigger than the bite,” Deepwater Asset Management Managing Partner Gene Munster posts to X after the ruling is handed down.
Google shares are trading 8% higher on the decision that the company can keep Chrome, he notes, while Apple shares also benefits from the expectation that it can maintain a deal that makes Google’s search engine the default on its Safari browser.
It was revealed at trial that Google paid more than $26 billion (£20.5 billion) for such deals with Apple, Mozilla, and others in 2021.
Judge Mehta’s ruling “doesn’t seem to be as draconian as the market was expecting,” says Melissa Otto, Head of TMT Research at S&P Global Visible Alpha.
With Google Search expected to generate closer to $200 billion this fiscal year, and tens of billions of that expected to go to distribution partners, it’s a win-win for the major corporate players involved in the case, Otto says.