WASHINGTON — Judge Amit P. Mehta has some tough decisions to make about Google.

That much was clear Friday as the federal judge, who sits on the U.S. District Court in Washington, peppered lawyers for the Justice Department and the tech company with questions during closing arguments over how best to fix the company’s search monopoly. The conclusion of the three-week hearing means the decision will now be in the hands of the judge, who is expected to issue a ruling by August.

The government has asked the court to force Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, and share the data behind its search results with rivals, among other measures. The company has countered with a far narrower proposal.

Mehta, who ruled last year that the company had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in search, asked questions that tipped his hand on some of the issues with which he was grappling in an effort to restore competition. He prodded a Google lawyer on whether there was a middle ground between the two proposals.

“It’s just some of these questions are very hard,” Mehta said during a long exchange with a Justice Department lawyer about how Google could be forced to share its data with competitors.

Mehta’s ruling could reshape a company synonymous with online search at a pivotal moment. Google is in a fierce race with other tech companies, including Microsoft, Meta and the startup OpenAI, to persuade consumers to use generative AI tools that can spit out humanlike answers to questions. Mehta’s ruling could directly hamper Google’s efforts to develop its own AI or offer a leg up to its competitors as they race to build their own new versions of AI-powered search.

In addition, Mehta’s decision will signal whether the government’s recent push to rein in the biggest tech companies through a series of antitrust lawsuits can result in significant changes to the way they do business.

The Justice Department is also pursuing a breakup of Google after winning a case earlier this year over its monopoly in some portions of the advertising technology business, and it has sued Apple on the grounds the company makes it difficult for consumers to ditch the iPhone. The Federal Trade Commission squared off against Meta in a trial this spring over claims it snuffed out nascent rivals and has also sued Amazon, arguing the company squeezes small sellers that use its site.The Justice Department and a group of states filed the case over Google search in 2020, under the first Trump administration. They argued at a 2023 trial that Google had boxed out competitors by paying billions to companies like Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to automatically display the Google search engine on smartphones and in web browsers.

As Google used those deals to attract more users, it gathered more data and made its search engine better, locking in an advantage over alternatives like Microsoft’s Bing.

Mehta agreed. In a landmark ruling in August, he said that Google “is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”

For three weeks starting April 21, the judge held a hearing to determine how he should address that problem.

Lawyers for the government argued that Google, without significant intervention by the court, would be able to parlay its dominance in online search into dominance in AI-powered search. Google had already started using the same search-boosting playbook to enhance its AI chatbot Gemini, they said. The government called witnesses from OpenAI, which makes the ChatGPT chatbot, and search rivals who said that access to Google’s search data would help them compete.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, testified that consumers were already using AI chatbot apps to search for information instead of going through Apple’s web browser, Safari, which automatically pulls up Google.

“The reason why we’re seeing less searches already in Safari is because people are downloading these apps; they are already doing this,” he said. “But they do have to get better.”

Google countered during the hearing that the government’s proposal would constitute a huge legal overreach and endanger products that are good for consumers. The company said the judge should instead focus on the deals with Apple, Samsung and others, by requiring Google to give those companies more flexibility than in earlier versions of the agreements.