2025 could have been a pretty disastrous year for Google. The company came in knowing it had three major legal battles to fight, increasing competition in the burgeoning AI market, and a new US president to adapt to. It looked possible — perhaps likely — that the company might be broken up and forced to sell off Chrome or part of its ad tech business, leaving it forever smaller.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, we’re looking back at a year where Google set profit records, persuaded the courts to let it keep the status quo going at least a little longer in search and advertising, and established itself as one of AI’s few unambiguous success stories. What changed?
First, it’s worth remembering how bad things looked like they might get for Google 12 months ago. Its biggest problems lay in the courtroom: it had been declared a monopoly and was staring down the barrel of remedies in its Search antitrust case, including the potential of a forced sale of its Chrome browser; it had to defend itself in a separate ad tech antitrust case that threatened the possible break up of its other big moneymaker; and it was trying to appeal its defeat in court against Epic Games, which could have seen it forced to slash its fees on Android apps and open up to alternative payment methods and third-party app stores. And in those first two cases, it would be fighting the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump, a loud and frequent Google critic.
Google’s worst fears haven’t come to pass
That’s all before you get to the fact that in addition to competing across all its usual product sectors — cloud computing, mobile, smart home, YouTube, and more — it had AI to worry about. Google couldn’t afford to miss out on tech that at bare minimum has the potential to upend its lucrative search business and could do a lot more than that, according to its proponents. But that meant fighting off old rivals like Microsoft and Meta, alongside new upstarts including OpenAI and Anthropic, all while pumping tens of billions into R&D and data centers just to keep up with the Joneses. Like every AI company, Google has had to take a very expensive gamble that this tech is ultimately going to pay dividends and that it will be one of the companies to profit when it does so. Google’s bet is even bigger than most, since its AI efforts are cannibalizing the golden goose, hastening Google Zero and eating into the search business that’s underpinned Google’s balance sheet for decades.
You can see why its executives might have had some nervous moments in January. But for the most part, Google’s worst fears haven’t come to pass.
The biggest bullet Google dodged was being forced to sell its browser Chrome. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google was a monopolist in search last August, but didn’t back the most headline-grabbing of the Department of Justice’s proposed fixes. The DOJ had argued that separating Google from its browser would remove one of the main ways it captures users and funnels them toward its search engine, prompting interest from suitors including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Yahoo, all of which would have quite liked their own way to funnel users to their search tools, thank you very much.
Google’s lawyers successfully convinced Mehta that splitting the business wasn’t the neatest solution, the judge ruling that “It would be incredibly messy and highly risky.” He also ruled that Google could keep making payments to Apple and other companies to secure prominent placement of its Search and AI products, one of the few cases where Google’s increased competition from OpenAI and other AI upstarts has done it a favor — Mehta argued that “these companies already are in a better position, both financially and technologically, to compete with Google than any traditional search company has been in decades (except perhaps Microsoft).”
Taken together, the remedies are fairly toothless
That’s not to say that Google got off without consequence. In fact, the main remedy Mehta did propose — that the company must sell its search data to rivals at a marginal cost, to help them build search competitors — is one that Google had fought against tooth and nail, arguing that it would “deeply undermine user trust” in search and put data in the hands of smaller, less secure companies. But even here, Google got most of its own way. It’s only required to sell a subset of its search data, not the whole lot, and only once, rather than regularly supplying rivals with its latest data.
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