The landmark decision on Monday is a major blow to Alphabet, Google's parent company, and could reshape how technology giants do business.
Google was sued by the US Department of Justice in 2020 over its control of 90% of the online search market.
This case has at times been described as posing an existential threat to Google and its owner given its dominance of the search and online advertising business.
It is unclear yet what penalties Google and Alphabet will face as a result of the decision. The fines or other remedies will be decided in a future hearing.
The government have asked for "structural relief" – which could, in theory at least, mean the break-up of the company.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly”, Judge Amil Mehta wrote in his 277-page opinion.
Alphabet said they plan to appeal against the ruling.
“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available", the statement from the company said.
Federal antitrust regulators have filed other pending lawsuits against Big Tech companies – including Meta Platforms, which own Facebook, Amazon.com and Apple Inc – accusing them of operating unlawful monopolies.
Monday's ruling comes after a 10-week trial in Washington DC, in which prosecutors accused Google of spending billions of dollars annually to Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and others to be pre-installed as the default search engine across platforms.
The US said Google typically pays more than $10 billion a year for that privilege, securing its access to a steady stream of user data that helped maintain its hold on the market.
Doing so, prosecutors said, meant other companies have not had the opportunity or resources to meaningfully compete.
In his ruling, Judge Mehta concluded that being the default search engine is "extremely valuable real estate" for Google. Very true!
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