Alphabet’s capitalization reached $3 trillion

After a court ruling that Google is not obligated to sell its Chrome browser, the market capitalization of its parent company Alphabet has grown to $3 trillion.

The company achieved this result thanks to a lenient verdict by US federal judge Amit P. Mehta in an antitrust case related to Google’s search business. Instead of forcing the sale of Chrome, the court limited itself to requiring changes to certain business practices.

In addition, Google retained the right to pay partners such as Apple and Mozilla to keep its search engine installed by default in Safari and Firefox browsers.

Alphabet became the fourth company in history to achieve such a valuation. Only Apple with a capitalization of $3.512 trillion, Microsoft with $3.830 trillion and NVIDIA, which holds the lead with a record figure of $4.329 trillion, are above it.

However, a US federal court ordered Google to pay $425 million in damages for privacy violations. According to the decision, the company continued to collect data from millions of users even after they turned off the tracking feature in their accounts. This is reported by the BBC.

The court found Google guilty on two of the three counts, while the company’s actions were not qualified as malicious. The class action lawsuit was filed in July 2020 and affected about 98 million users and 174 million devices. The plaintiffs claimed that Google had access to their mobile devices and continued to collect, store and use data despite the disabled settings.

The lawsuit noted that similar practices affected hundreds of thousands of applications, including Uber and Lyft, Alibaba and Amazon marketplaces, as well as Meta social networks – Facebook and Instagram.

The company said the court’s decision distorts the principles of how Google products work. A spokesperson for the corporation told the BBC that the company intends to appeal, stressing that users have tools to control their data and their choices are respected.