Lauren Feiner, reporting for The Verge earlier this week:

Google will not have to sell its Chrome browser in order to address its illegal monopoly in online search, DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Tuesday. Over a year ago, Judge Mehta found that the search giant had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act; his ruling now determines what Google must do in response.

Mehta declined to grant some of the more ambitious proposals from the Justice Department to remedy Google’s behavior and restore competition to the market. Besides letting Google keep Chrome, he’ll also let the company continue to pay distribution partners for preloading or placement of its search or AI products. But he did order Google to share some valuable search information with rivals that could help jumpstart their ability to compete, and bar the search giant from making exclusive deals to distribute its search or AI assistant products in ways that might cut off distribution for rivals.

I’m a few days late linking to this because (a) I’m swimming in tabs, and (b) I wanted to gather a consensus about how people are feeling about the ruling. On one hand, we have Google apologists who think this is somehow too onerous and the original ruling should be thrown out because America is a capitalist country or something. On the other hand, Google’s antagonists are furious with Judge Mehta for not levying a larger, more significant punishment and practically handing Google a free win. I land nowhere on this spectrum, because I think Judge Mehta’s ruling is as perfect as it could be, which is to say, outrageously imperfect.

Google is an illegal monopoly, as the judge ruled, a distinction that is important because it is not necessarily illegal to be a monopoly in the United States. Rather, anticompetitive behavior — abusing your monopoly — is illegal, and Google was found to be disadvantaging its competition unfairly. Judge Mehta didn’t rule this way because of the search default contracts Google has with Mozilla or Apple alone, but because of the results of those contracts. They killed any other search engine’s access to users, which, in turn, destroyed competitors’ products because they had no users to improve their algorithms with. It’s not the money Judge Mehta has the issue with — it’s the lack of competition that stemmed from the access Google paid Apple for.

This is where the trial goes awry for me: I think Google should’ve tried to prove the search deal was to users’ benefit, rather than arguing the deal was necessary for Google to stay afloat. The latter excuse is laughable, and ultimately is what lost Google the trial. Google is the dominant search engine for a reason: it’s a good product. Bing is the default on Windows, by far the world’s most popular computer operating system, and Google still remains at the top overall. People love Chrome and Google, and Google did work to ensure that. Therefore, the contract between Google and Apple should’ve existed to ensure people always got access to Google without confusion — without having to choose an inferior product accidentally — not for Google’s own benefit, but for consumers.

Either way, the past is the past, and when it was time to sort out remedies, Judge Mehta realized the monetary exchange between Google and Apple was insignificant. Rather, the fact that Google illegally locked other search companies out of the country’s most popular mobile operating system was far more significant. The result of that illegal action was that Google’s search algorithms and data improved — far more than any of Google’s competition — so the appropriate remedy was to force Google to give up that data. Google still has plenty more ground to compete on, but the judge found that Google illegally improved a part of its product, and thus, must expunge that improvement. Apple and Google can still keep their contract, but now other competitors have a chance to become as good as Google one day.

I’d also like to think Judge Mehta was in a precarious position because he had to balance consumer interests with the law. Forcing Google to sell Chrome, for example, would only disadvantage consumers because Chrome has no revenue model by itself. It would punish Google in the short term, but it would also severely disrupt hundreds of millions of Americans’ lives in the process. Forcing Google to make its core search product worse is punitive damage for Google and its billions of users. Ultimately, the reason for antitrust remedies is to benefit consumers by removing an unfair advantage from an illegal monopoly. The consumer benefit is, in a capitalist economy, more competition. But if creating more competition directly causes the loss of an important product, even temporarily, the trade-off is not worth it.

This is obviously legalese nonsense in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the best that could be done here. I think Google deserves greater punishment for breaking the law, but any further punishment would result in a catch-22 for end consumers. You can’t be mad at Judge Mehta for this ruling, no matter how stridently you support Google or how much you antagonize it.