In December, Google spent $700 million to resolve states’ claims that its Play Retailer had strong-armed app makers into excessive charges and difficult phrases. About six weeks after that, Google paid $350 million to finish a lawsuit accusing it of improperly sharing customers’ non-public info.

On Monday morning, a Massachusetts firm referred to as Singular Computing mentioned it had resolved its lawsuit with Google, involving claims that the tech big had stolen its chip designs. Singular mentioned in a information launch that it had “entered right into a settlement and patent license settlement with Google.”

Google can also be on the verge of a fourth authorized settlement in three months to finish claims that it has misrepresented the privateness settings of its Chrome net browser.

In just some months, Google has spent properly over $1 billion to clear the decks for court docket fights that would show much more damaging to the corporate and that would reshape your complete web trade: two federal fits introduced by the Division of Justice, focusing on Google’s search engine and its promoting enterprise.

The Justice Division accused Google of rigging the search market by way of preferential offers with telephone makers like Apple and Samsung. The corporate will return to court docket in Might for closing arguments in what’s more likely to be the largest authorized check for a tech firm since U.S. v. Microsoft greater than 20 years in the past.

Within the different federal lawsuit, anticipated to go to trial in September, the Justice Division mentioned that Google “corrupted professional competitors within the advert tech trade” by taking management of the wide-swath of instruments that advertisers and publishers trusted to purchase and promote adverts. Google has denied wrongdoing in each circumstances, saying that its search engine promotes on-line competitors and its advert know-how has supplied a monetary lifeline to publishers and different on-line companies.

Google mentioned in an announcement that it was not clearing the decks for future litigation and had received dozens of circumstances in U.S. courts prior to now yr.

“When it is smart, we settle circumstances to keep away from extended, unsure and dear litigation,” José Castañeda, a Google spokesman, mentioned. “And when we have to defend ourselves and the trade, we do.”

The Justice Division may ask the court docket to ban Google’s preferential offers with browser makers, and it may argue that distribution platforms for its search engine, such because the Chrome browser or Android working system, must be spun out of the corporate.

The division has already argued that Google must be pressured to spin off its promoting know-how unit, to loosen the advert trade’s dependence on the corporate. Any divestiture can be a pricey and time-consuming course of, chipping away on the firm’s income and affect.

Many of the current settlements additionally adopted the corporate’s gorgeous loss to Epic Video games, the maker of the hit sport Fortnite, in a high-profile trial in December. Epic had claimed that Google undermined competitors for app makers by way of excessive charges and stringent guidelines, and a San Francisco jury agreed. Google has began its enchantment of the decision, however a federal decide might order the corporate to simply accept extra cost strategies and app shops on Android’s cell working system.

Douglas Melamed, a visiting fellow at Stanford Regulation Faculty, mentioned that “on this time of fairly dramatic change in regulatory and authorized danger for all these massive know-how platforms,” Google could also be considering it’s time to resolve smaller circumstances “simply so we don’t have it hanging over us.”

Google’s patent case with Singular revolved round a few of the firm’s most essential chips — used to run synthetic intelligence — referred to as Tensor Processing Models. Singular had mentioned that its founder, Joseph Bates, met with Google from 2010 to 2014 and mentioned his chip designs. Years later, Google’s T.P.U.s infringed on two of Dr. Bates’s patents, Singular argued when it filed its swimsuit in late 2019.

Singular has cited an e mail from Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, by which he wrote that Singular’s designs have been “very well suited” to Google’s chip initiatives. The events agreed to settle the case in January.

Singular had sought $1.67 billion in damages. The businesses declined to touch upon the monetary phrases of their settlement. In its assertion, Singular mentioned Google agreed to a patent license. The tech big didn’t admit to being at fault.

“As we confirmed in court docket, Singular’s patent doesn’t apply to our Tensor Processing Models, which have been independently designed and constructed by Google engineers utilizing Google know-how over a few years,” Mr. Castañeda, the Google spokesman, mentioned.

Dr. Bates, Singular’s founder, mentioned that the corporate’s purpose was to present universities supercomputers, which he hopes “might assist restrict the focus of energy A.I. gives the large tech firms.”

Within the $700 million settlement with attorneys basic for all 50 states, Google agreed to permit app makers to supply their very own billing techniques and app shops on Android units. However crucially, Google can proceed charging giant firms charges no matter how shoppers pay, although app makers get a reduction for processing their very own transactions. If the states’ claims had not been settled, they might have been heard throughout Epic’s trial.

In December, Google mentioned it will settle a class-action case that alleged the settings of its non-public shopping tab in Chrome, referred to as incognito mode, weren’t very non-public. The swimsuit mentioned that Google had misled customers by persevering with to trace their on-line exercise in incognito mode.

The case had already created damaging headlines for Google, together with the disclosure that its chief advertising and marketing officer, Lorraine Twohill, wrote to Google’s chief government, Sundar Pichai, complaining that incognito mode was troublesome to market as a result of it was “not actually non-public, thus requiring actually fuzzy, hedging language that’s nearly extra damaging.”

A California federal decide ordered Google to pay sanctions for lacking discovery deadlines, making it cowl a few of the authorized payments for the plaintiffs’ attorneys, led by the high-profile lawyer David Boies. Google mentioned in an announcement that it had “cooperated with exhaustive discovery.” A trial was scheduled to start out in early February, and would have introduced extra disclosures about Google by way of proof and testimony. The corporate mentioned in December it will settle the case, and an official settlement is predicted to land this month.

“We settled as a result of we basically obtained what we may have gotten if we went to trial and received,” Mr. Boies mentioned in an interview.

In February, Google mentioned it will pay $350 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit a few privateness breach at its defunct social media website, Google+. The service had inadvertently given builders entry to customers’ info from 2015 to 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018, and Google was accused of concealing the difficulty from customers and regulators even after it fastened the issue.

The corporate had settled with Google+ customers for $7.5 million in 2020, however the shareholder lawsuit continued. Google had tried a number of instances to get the case thrown out, together with in 2022 when it unsuccessfully requested the Supreme Court docket to intervene. In the long run, the one option to make the case go away was forging a deal.

It’s attainable in a number of of those circumstances that Google would have needed to pay more cash in damages than it settled for if they’d remained in court docket, Mr. Melamed and different authorized consultants mentioned.

“The issue with litigation is everytime you stroll into court docket, there’s an 80 % probability that something can occur, together with you may get arrested,” Mr. Melamed mentioned, recounting the phrases of a buddy. “It’s simply so unpredictable.”