(Reuters) -HashKey Group will launch its inaugural Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) focused fund with an initial target size of $500 million, Hong Kong’s largest licensed crypto exchange said on Monday.

The multi-currency fund’s DAT strategy refers to public companies accumulating cryptocurrency assets to capitalise on higher token prices and a softening regulatory environment.

The strategy’s popularity surged this year as many companies seek to replicate the success of U.S.-based Strategy, a software company that began accumulating bitcoin in 2020 and holds more than $63 billion in cryptocurrency as of June.

Strategy copycats have increased their bitcoin holdings to nearly 100,000 bitcoin collectively, according to Standard Chartered.

Through investing in and operating top-tier DAT projects globally, HashKey aims to advance crypto asset standardisation and accelerate the development of a sustainable Web3 ecosystem, it said in a statement. Web3 refers to a version of the internet that is decentralised and operates on blockchain technology.

“HashKey will build a diversified portfolio by initiating and investing in a range of DAT projects focused on mainstream crypto assets, with an initial emphasis on Ethereum and Bitcoin ecosystem projects,” it said.

Lawmakers this week renewed a push to ban lawmaker stock trading, as previously competing proposals were merged and a new 10-page Restore Trust in Congress Act was unveiled to fanfare. The hope: The stars might finally be aligning around the issue. That optimism rests on widespread public support — one survey found 86% of Americans backed a ban — and a trio of policy choices that could help the bill navigate coming political attacks and the pocketbook concerns of some skeptical lawmakers. These three provisions, for one thing, sidestep President Trump and his White House. (They are excluded from the ban.) They also include tax breaks for lawmakers as they divest and ban certain types of blind trusts. Advocates hope these changes could help the bill navigate tricky politics as lawmakers decide whether to police themselves. “We have reached a tipping point where pressure from outside the building is becoming too much for leadership to deny,” Rep. Seth Magaziner, a Rhode Island Democrat, said during the formal unveiling Wednesday. Magaziner is leading the new effort alongside Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican. Both are promising to force a full vote on the House floor one way or another. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, is also pushing the effort. She set a deadline of the end of this month, when she says she’ll seek to force a vote through the discharge petition process to bypass leadership. The renewed push comes with lawmaker trading in new focus after a series of reports have highlighted an elevated number of stock transactions around tariff-fueled market fluctuations earlier this year. “Having a compromise bill that has the leads of all of these major bills on it is a huge step forward,” said Aaron Stephens, a senior legislative strategist at Progressive Change Campaign Committee, one of several groups that have been prodding this issue for years. He added that the previously somewhat scattered effort has “always been a barrier to getting this done [but] now that this compromise text is out, we actually have something to push forward with.”

A push to keep Trump out of it

The concept of a ban has also been getting some tentative support from leaders. Last month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he is in favor of a ban. Just this week, House Speaker Mike Johnson reiterated to Punchbowl News his personal support for a ban, but added, “I respect the views of other people on the subject,” calling it “a tough issue.” The strategy for the bill’s proponents — which includes supporters from liberals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Trump allies like Tim Burchett of Tennessee — appears to be to get quick momentum behind it and overcome financial concerns and any leadership slow-walking. One step is removing the political roadblocks that have stopped efforts before. In 2022, an effort to pass a ban floundered when Democrats said that the White House, Supreme Court, and Federal Reserve officials should be included in a ban. Partisan objections quickly sank the effort. This time around, advocates are focused solely on lawmakers, even as amendments to include more officials remain possible. “I would likely support going in that direction,” Rep. Roy noted this week of the idea of banning trading among more Washington officials. But he defended the more limited approach, saying, “I think we need to focus right now on one very clear message.” Trump himself has sent a series of mixed messages on the issue. This spring, Trump said he would “absolutely” sign a bill banning members of Congress from trading stocks. But then this summer, Trump attacked a GOP lawmaker who was pushing a plan that would include the office of the president, saying it plays into Democratic hands and that his opponents “have been trying to ‘Target’ me for a long period of time.” Excluding Trump is a detail sure to make some Democrats uneasy, but even some of Trump’s biggest adversaries, like Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, remain on board “I think we are doing the simplest thing that we can do, in many ways,” she said this week.

Other provisions to mollify persistent worries

In addition, two other provisions are sure to be closely chewed over in the weeks ahead and may impact lawmakers’ pocketbooks more directly. The first is an exclusion of so-called qualified blind trusts. Allowing this more limited version of the blind trust has raised worries as a potential loophole — especially if lawmakers use the process to put their assets into a trust that does not require that the underlying assets necessarily be sold. A more comprehensive blind trust — one that requires the underlying asset to be sold off and replaced without the owner’s knowledge — remains allowed. But it is a more complicated procedure, generally open only to those with the biggest bank accounts. Fewer options on blind trusts may be unappealing to lawmakers, but there is also one key carrot in the bill: tax rule provisions that would limit the short-term tax hit if the bill passes and lawmakers are forced to divest. The bill would give existing members — and their spouses and dependent children — 180 days to sell individual stocks (widely held mutual funds and ETFs will remain allowed) and then impose fines and force lawmakers to disgorge any profits if they break the rules. Newly elected members of Congress will have 90 days from their swearing-in to divest their individual stocks. And when they do? This bill would allow what is called a certificate of divestiture to delay any mammoth tax bill that might come with selling assets all at once Capital gains on profits would be deferred for those who divest until potentially years later. For example, when a member later sells a mutual fund that they moved their funds into. “We won’t make you have a big tax bill,” Roy noted this week, “but you are going to have to divest of all of these individual equities and put them into broadly held funds so you’re not able to day trade.”

The US labor market is showing clearer signs of softening.

And the strain is falling hardest on Americans just entering the job market. Labor Department data released Friday showed the unemployment rate for workers ages 16 to 24 climbed to 10.5% in August, the first time it’s topped 10% since the pandemic.

The data comes against a backdrop of an increasingly tough job market for newly minted college grads. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has consistently outpaced that of the broader workforce in the past several years, reversing a pre-pandemic trend when degree-holders typically fared better, according to a report from the Bank of America Institute published earlier this week.

In June 2025, the unemployment rate for recent graduates was 4.8%, compared with 4% for all workers and 7.4% for young workers without a degree, the report said, citing BLS and Census Bureau data compiled by the New York Fed.

The Institute defines “recent graduates” as workers ages 22 to 27 with at least a bachelor’s degree, while “young workers” are those in the same age range without a bachelor’s degree.

The divergence between the jobless rate for new grads and the broader population began emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic, with recent graduates starting to see consistently higher jobless rates compared to the broader labor force beginning in 2021. Economists pointed to particular weakness in white-collar occupations, with consulting, tech, finance, and other degree-heavy fields facing layoffs and hiring freezes after the pandemic boom.

“People with college degrees like recent graduates might be finding themselves in an increasingly competitive environment that doesn’t necessarily guarantee the same level of employment security that it once did,” Taylor Bowley, economist at the Bank of America Institute, told Yahoo Finance.

Bowley pointed to heightened uncertainty around tariffs and investment decisions, as well as new technologies reshaping entry-level roles. That uncertainty has only deepened amid the turbulence of President Trump’s unprecedented second term. And while some hesitation is typical ahead of elections, Bowley said this moment feels different.

“It’s not atypical to see uncertainty before an election, because businesses wait to see what policies a new administration might bring,” she said. “But this is a different kind of uncertainty — one that’s been quite persistent since the start of the year and seems to be ongoing.”

Dot, an AI companion app that aimed to be a friend and confidante, is shutting down, the company announced on Friday. On a message published on its website, the startup behind Dot, New Computer, said that the product will remain operational until October 5, giving users time to download their data.

Launched in 2024 by co-founders Sam Whitmore and former Apple designer Jason Yuan, Dot waded into what’s now become a more controversial area for AI chatbots. The app they created was described as an AI “friend and companion,” which would become more personalized to you and your interests over time in order to offer advice, sympathy, and emotional support.

As Yuan explained at the time, Dot was “facilitating a relationship with my inner self. It’s like a living mirror of myself, so to speak,” he said.

However, this may not be a safe area to invest in as a smaller startup.

As AI technology has become more mainstream, there have been reports of how emotionally vulnerable people have been led into delusional thinking by AI chatbots like ChatGPT. This has led to a phenomenon described as “AI psychosis,” resulting from how the scyophantic chatbots reinforce a user’s confused or paranoid beliefs.

As Dot shuts down, AI chatbot apps broadly have been falling under increased scrutiny over safety concerns. OpenAI is currently being sued by the parents of a California teenager who took his life after messaging with ChatGPT about his suicidal thoughts. Other stories have highlighted how AI companion apps can reinforce unhealthy behaviors in users who are mentally unwell. This week, two U.S. attorneys general sent a letter to OpenAI over safety concerns.

Dot’s makers didn’t address whether these types of issues had weighed on the founders’ minds. Instead, the brief post only notes that Whitmore and Yuan’s shared “Northstar” had diverged.

“Rather than compromise either vision, we’ve decided to go our separate ways and wind down operations,” the post explains.

“We want to be sensitive to the fact that this means many of you will lose access to a friend, confidante, and companion, which is somewhat unprecedented in software, so we want to give you some time to say goodbye. Dot will remain operational until October 5, and until then you can download all of your data by navigating to the settings page and tapping ‘Request your data.’”

The post suggests the startup had “hundreds of thousands” of users, but data from app intelligence provider Appfigures sees only 24,500 lifetime downloads on iOS since launching in June 2024. (There was no Android version.)

Nvidia said on Friday the AI GAIN Act would restrict global competition for advanced chips, with similar effects on the U.S. leadership and economy as the AI Diffusion Rule, which put limits on the computing power countries could have.

Short for Guaranteeing Access and Innovation for National Artificial Intelligence Act, the GAIN AI Act was introduced as part of the National Defense Authorization Act and stipulates that AI chipmakers prioritize domestic orders for advanced processors before supplying them to foreign customers.

“We never deprive American customers in order to serve the rest of the world. In trying to solve a problem that does not exist, the proposed bill would restrict competition worldwide in any industry that uses mainstream computing chips,” an Nvidia spokesperson said.

If passed into law, the bill would enact new trade restrictions mandating exporters obtain licenses and approval for the shipments of silicon exceeding certain performance caps.

“It should be the policy of the United States and the Department of Commerce to deny licenses for the export of the most powerful AI chips, including such chips with total processing power of 4,800 or above and to restrict the export of advanced artificial intelligence chips to foreign entities so long as United States entities are waiting and unable to acquire those same chips,” the legislation reads.

The rules mirror some conditions under former U.S. President Joe Biden’s AI diffusion rule, which allocated certain levels of computing power to allies and other countries.

The AI Diffusion Rule and AI GAIN Act are attempts by Washington to prioritize American needs, ensuring domestic firms gain access to advanced chips while limiting China’s ability to obtain high-end tech amid fears that the country would use AI capabilities to supercharge its military.

Last month, President Donald Trump made an unprecedented deal with Nvidia to give the government a cut of its sales in exchange for resuming exports of banned AI chips to China.

Chip design workers at Chinese tech giant ByteDance, many based in Beijing or Shanghai, unexpectedly found out last week that they are part of a Singapore unit, three people familiar with the matter said.

The employees made the discovery when they were moved into a new group on the company’s internal messaging platform, two of the people said.

Having chip design staff report into a Singapore unit may help ByteDance navigate U.S.-China tensions as it seeks to access advanced semiconductor technology.

Since late 2023, U.S. regulations have prevented companies based in mainland China from using Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chip manufacturer, to produce advanced AI chips above certain performance thresholds.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not disclose the name of the unit.

Reuters was not able to learn how many of ByteDance’s chip design staff are part of this unit.

ByteDance, which is best known outside China as the owner of TikTok, did not respond to a request for comment.

ByteDance is one of many tech firms worldwide ramping up efforts to develop proprietary chips, known as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), in a bid to reduce reliance on suppliers such as Nvidia.

It does not currently outsource chip manufacturing to TSMC, but sources said last year that it was working with U.S. chip designer Broadcom on developing an advanced AI processor that would be made by the Taiwanese firm.

ByteDance has a Singapore-registered entity called Picoheart that the company incorporated in December 2023, according to business registration records. Picoheart attracted attention last year when it acquired a 9.5% stake in Chinese memory chip maker Innostar.

ByteDance also has large data centers in Singapore and TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, is based there.

ByteDance began hiring chip-related staff in earnest in 2022. It has, however, launched fewer chips than rivals such as Alibaba and Baidu.

Currently, chips released by ByteDance can only handle inference tasks, which are less computationally intensive than training workloads, two of the sources said.

ByteDance’s chip development portfolio includes video decoding and networking chips, and it has a dedicated team focusing on artificial intelligence applications, they added.

Recent job postings by the company show six positions seeking chip-related talent, including one for its AI chip team.

Chinese venture capital firm Lanchi Ventures is doubling down on investing in China’s artificial intelligence and robotics start-ups while raising a new fund amid increased global investor appetite for the country’s early-stage tech firms, its executives said.

Lanchi Ventures, formerly known as BlueRun Ventures China, would continue to be “all in” on AI and robotics, focusing on AI applications, multimodal AI models and firms targeting overseas markets, managing partner Jui Tan said in an interview with the South China Morning Post last week.

The firm manages over 15 billion yuan (US$2.1 billion), including a 5.5 billion yuan fund largely focused on AI. It has so far placed bets on Moonshot AI, the firm behind the Kimi large language models, AI agent maker Genspark, and robotics firms Galbot and AgiBot.

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Lanchi said it remained committed to investing in Chinese embodied AI start-ups because of the continuously improving abilities of robots and the abundance of applications in fields such as manufacturing.

“China has many scenarios that allow [robots] to acquire data, so I believe there isn’t a significant gap compared to the United States,” Tan said. “In fact, we might even perform better, possibly due to this substantial advantage in data.”

AI is still in its early days, with many new applications and capabilities yet to emerge in the future, according to Tan.

While China was still catching up in advanced semiconductors, which once presented hurdles for Chinese AI investment amid US chip curbs, local AI firms have since adapted and found various solutions for computing power, Tan said.

“They can’t entirely bet on Nvidia or completely bet on Chinese solutions,” Tan said. “They all pursue multiple paths.”

While Lanchi’s current 5.5 billlion yuan fund still has “a lot of dry powder”, it is now in the process of raising a new fund to keep investing in China’s AI start-ups, with an eye out for “new capabilities and new boundaries” that could “significantly enhance productivity”, Tan said.

He said that Lanchi’s upcoming fund would be similar in size to its current ones, without disclosing the exact target amount. The firm had already raised a portion of the capital, according to Tan.

While the new fund’s limited partners would mainly come from Asia, including China, Lanchi was also having ongoing discussions with institutions in the US, according to Lanchi Ventures partner Elissa Liu.

While American investments in China’s tech sector have fizzled in recent years amid rising geopolitical tensions, Liu said that the sentiment has been changing.

“Ultimately, capital is inherently profit-driven … and it comes down to where they can generate returns,” Liu said. “After a recalibration, they’ll make new decisions. And that’s what we have felt recently – there has been an increase in activity and attention, including from the United States.”

“People can see that in this wave of AI development, the US and China are the leading forces, and we are seeing more Chinese AI entrepreneurs with a global vision,” Tan said. “So we feel that there’s been more global investors paying attention.”

Lanchi, which dropped its previous Silicon Valley brand BlueRun in 2023, last year expanded its operations to Hong Kong, looking to support the global expansion of Chinese firms. Overseas markets remain a main theme for Lanchi’s investments, and Hong Kong served as a great place to capture talent, according to the executives.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

French AI startup Mistral AI is finalizing a €2 billion investment at a post-money valuation of $14 billion, reports Bloomberg, positioning the company as one of Europe’s most valuable tech startups. The two-year-old OpenAI rival, founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, develops open source language models and Le Chat, its AI chatbot built for European audiences.

Mistral isn’t commenting on the report, but the round would represent Mistral’s first major raise since June 2024, when it was valued at €5.8 billion. The company has previously raised over €1 billion from prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst.

The investment comes as European AI startups gain unprecedented momentum. European AI companies secured 55% more year-on-year investment in Q1 2025, according to Dealroom, with 12 European startups achieving unicorn status in the first half of the year. Also leading this surge is Sweden’s Lovable, an AI coding platform that reached a $1.8 billion valuation in July just eight months after its launch.

With Nvidia’s (NVDA) earnings officially in the rear view, the tech world now turns its attention to Apple (AAPL), which will host its annual fall event next week. Set for Sept. 9, the showcase is expected to include the launch of the company’s much-anticipated iPhone 17 Air. A slimmed-down version of the iPhone, the Air will bring some of the biggest changes to Apple’s most important product in years, according to Apple soothsayer Mark Gurman. It could also help boost iPhone sales in the near term. But Apple’s flagship product faces a number of headwinds, ranging from an expected price increase to a lack of premium camera features. Apple’s iPhone Air is expected to be about 2 millimeters thinner than current iPhones, according to Gurman. That seems rather insignificant, but it should provide a noticeable difference for longtime iPhone owners. The iPhone Air’s weight-loss journey could prove to have downsides, though. The phone is expected to come with just one camera rather than the two found on the standard iPhone and three on the Pro models, which could keep consumers from making the switch to the Air. After all, would you rather have a single camera or two or three with varying optical zoom options? A skinnier frame could also mean the iPhone Air will have a smaller battery, another strike against the smartphone, unless Apple can get more juice out of a charge via software tricks. Apple is also widely expected to raise the prices of its devices, with projections ranging from a $50 to a $100 price hike on iPhone 17 Air, and a $50 jump on iPhone Pro and Pro Max models. That would put the price of the iPhone 17 Air, which is set to replace the $899 iPhone Plus, between $949 and $999. The iPhone 17 Pro would now cost $1,049, while the Pro Max would come in at $1,249. Despite those potential downsides, Deepwater Asset Management managing partner Gene Munster says Apple should see a solid upgrade cycle with its latest generation of iPhones. “The vast majority of sales, about 80% of sales, are going to be from people upgrading,” Munster told Yahoo Finance. “And for them, it’s largely not about what the features are in a given year, it’s about what they were compared to the phone that they had, which is on average four years old. So they’re comparing it, in this case, it would be an iPhone 13 versus an iPhone 17,” he added.

The iPhone 17 could still thrive

Generally, new iPhone designs help drive a surge in consumer interest and overall sales. But according to BofA Global Research analyst Wamsi Mohan, that may not be the case for the iPhone 17 lineup. “While prior form factor changes have driven a meaningfully higher next iPhone cycle, in our opinion, investor expectations for the benefit from a thin phone are more tempered,” Mohan wrote in an Aug. 25 investor note. “We model iPhones growing 1% [year-over-year] in [fiscal 2026] (to 235mn units), which is mostly in-line with [Wall Street] at 233 [million],” he added. KeyBanc Capital Markets’ Brandon Nispel said that even though the iPhone 17 Air might offer a thinner design, he doesn’t think the change will be enough to get customers overly excited for the phone. “The Plus model was never very popular … and the Air is probably just going to take the demand of the Plus and then probably pull some people from the standard and the Pro Max model, would be my guess,” Nispel told Yahoo Finance. It’s not just that the iPhone 17 could pack a higher price or fewer cameras; tariff-driven sales in the early half of the year could hinder demand in the latter half of 2025. “We had such a strong pull in demand; both Q1 and Q2 came in significantly above forecast,” explained Nabila Popal, senior research director for IDC’s Worldwide Device Tracker. According to Popal, smartphone sales in China, one of Apple’s most important markets, are also expected to tumble in the second half of the year. Despite all of that, both Munster and Popal say that iPhone 17 sales should grow versus iPhone 16 sales. According to IDC, global smartphone shipments should increase 1% year over year, powered by a 3.9% improvement in iOS device shipments. Munster says smartphone sales should increase in spite of so many headwinds, thanks, in part, to customers who purchased iPhones during the pandemic and are looking to upgrade. In 2021, iPhone sales grew 39% year over year, leaving a large pool of potential upgraders ready to grab an iPhone 17. We’ll find out how consumers feel as the iPhone 17 is expected to hit stores later this month.

Google (GOOG, GOOGL) won’t be forced to sell Chrome after a federal district judge ruled divestment a “poor fit” in a landmark antitrust case, but it will have to share data that helped it hold onto its search monopoly.

The ruling from District of Columbia judge Amit Mehta sent Google’s stock soaring by more than 8% in after-hours trading.

As part of the decision Mehta ruled that Google can continue to make payments to “distribution partners for preloading or placement of Google Search, Chrome, or GenAI products.” That allows for Google to continue to make its $20 billion per year payments to Apple in exchange for the iPhone maker using Google Search as the default search engine in its Safari browser and Siri.

Shares of Apple rose more than 3%.

The Justice Department had pushed for a forced sale of the company’s search business, and for the judge to order an end multi-billion dollar contracts that have all but assured Google’s market dominance, moves the judge denied to make.

“Plaintiffs have not shown that their behavioral remedies will be ineffective without the immediate divestiture of Chrome,” Mehta said.

The court’s task, Mehta said, is to discern between conduct that maintains a monopoly through anticompetitive acts as distinct from conduct that fuels a monopoly’s growth as a consequence of a superior product.

“After two complete trials, this court cannot find that Google’s market dominance is sufficiently attributable to its illegal conduct to justify divestiture,” of Chrome the judge said, adding that such “radical structural relief” would require a more heightened causal connection.

Judge Mehta also declined to grant the DOJ’s request for a contingent divestment of Google’s Android operating system, writing that the government “did not present any evidence to justify a contingent structural remedy.”

Throughout the decision the judge noted the rise of search competition posed by generative-AI, which he said posed “strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work.”

While Google will be able to keep its Chrome browser, Andoid operating system, and continue making payments to distrubution partners, the company also has to make a number of changes.

The search giant is barred from entering in to exclusive contracts related to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini. Google also cant’ condition the licensing of its Play Store or any other Google app on the distribution or preloading of other Google services, or condition receiving revenue sharing payments from one Google app on the placement of another app.

Google will also be required to provide “Qualified Competitors” with certain search index and user-interaction data, as well as search and search text ads syndication services.

The decision is one of two major antitrust lawsuits that Google lost to the Justice Department and US states in the past year.

The DOJ and a group of states prevailed over Google in August last year in two consolidated cases that alleged the tech giant abused its dominance in online search.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his ruling on the antitrust claims.

Google was defeated by the DOJ and 35 states, along with Guam, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, in another antitrust case decided in April. That case, which alleged that Google unfairly held on to its market dominance in search engine advertising, and search engine text advertising, is pending in Alexandria, Virginia and set to begin its remedies phase in September.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision, but is expected to appeal.

The search giant argued at trial that it gained its search dominance not by securing exclusive contracts, but by offering “the best” search engine on the market. Google claimed that despite holding monopolies in the search markets, its contracts neither violated antitrust laws nor harmed competition.

The judge’s ruling in that case also held that Google violated antitrust law in the market for “general search text,” ads, which appear at the top of search results pages.

For Google, the judge’s decision affects a huge profit engine. In 2024, Google’s search engine advertising business generated more than $198 billion in revenue, accounting for 56.6% of its parent company, Alphabet’s, total revenue.

The figure handily exceeds Google’s search engine advertising revenue in 2023, which totaled $175 billion, despite its antitrust defeat and a shift in online searches to artificial intelligence-based chatbots.

As of June 2023, Google controlled 91% of the global search engine market across all computing platforms, and 87% in the US, according to Statcounter. On mobile, Google’s market share was even higher at 95%.

More recent data from Statcounter from July 2025 showed Google’s global share of the search engine market dropped to 89.5%, dipping below 90% for the first time since 2015. Statcounter does not benchmark traditional search engine traffic against newer search techniques using chatbots. According to the data, Google ceded traffic to traditional search engine competitors Bing and Yandex.

The judge’s decision in the search case came after a two-month trial in 2023 that included testimony from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as executives from search market rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and DuckDuckGo.

The DOJ and state’s claims were handled together because of their nearly identical allegations that said Google held on to its monopoly by paying companies like Apple, Amazon, Mozilla, and Firefox to make Google the default search provider on mobile phones, tablets, and browsers.

At the time of the lawsuit, Google held a 90% share in online search.

Google’s disputed behavior revolved around contracts it entered into with manufacturers of computer devices and mobile devices, as well as with browser services, browser developers, and wireless carriers.

These contracts, the government claimed, violated antitrust laws because they made Google the mandatory default search provider.

Companies that entered into those exclusive contracts have included Apple, LG, Samsung, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Mozilla. Those deals are why smartphones from manufacturers including Samsung, one of the world’s largest smartphone makers, come preloaded with Google’s various apps.