Google will not be forced to sell its Chrome browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday in the tech giant's ongoing legal battle over being ruled a monopoly last year. The company will be barred from certain exclusive deals with device makers and must share data from its search engine with competitors, the judge ruled. Judge Amit Mehta's ruling follows months of speculation surrounding what penalties Google would face as a result of his decision last year that the company violated antitrust laws as it built what he called an online search monopoly. The ruling, one of the most significant antitrust cases in decades, resulted in an additional hearing in April to determine what actions the government should take as a remedy. Mehta's decision to allow Google to keep Chrome represents a more lenient outcome for the company than what federal prosecutors requested: force the tech giant sell off its marquee search product and to ban it from entering the browser market for five years.

The US government has noticed the potentially negative effects of generative AI on areas like journalism and content creation. Senator Amy Klobuchar, along with seven Democrat colleagues, urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department to probe generative AI products like ChatGPT for potential antitrust violations, they wrote in a press release. "Recently, multiple dominant online platforms have introduced new generative AI features that answer user queries by summarizing, or, in some cases, merely regurgitating online content from other sources or platforms," the letter states. "The introduction of these new generative AI features further threatens the ability of journalists and other content creators to earn compensation for their vital work." The lawmakers went on to note that traditional search results lead users to publishers' websites while AI-generated summaries keep the users on the search platform "where that platform alone can profit from the user's attention through advertising and data collection."