Judge Narrows Scope of Coming Trial Over Google Monopoly Claims

A federal judge said this week that the Justice Department and a group of states could not move forward with some claims in antitrust complaints against Google, narrowing the scope of what is set to be the most significant federal monopoly trial against a tech giant in decades.

In the decision, which was unsealed on Friday, Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed four claims in the lawsuits and allowed government lawyers to move forward with three.

Judge Mehta wrote that a trial was warranted to assess whether Google’s exclusivity deals for web browsers and preloading its services on Android devices illegally helped the internet company maintain a monopoly. But he said the government had not “demonstrated the requisite anticompetitive effect” to prove that Google broke the law in other ways, such as by boosting its own products in search results over those of specialized sites, like Amazon and Yelp.

The decision sets the stage for the first major tech monopoly trial since the federal government took Microsoft to court in the 1990s,…