US regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to stifle competition through its main search engine, after a court found it maintained an abusive monopoly over the past decade.
The proposed crackdown was revealed in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the US Department of Justice, which would include tough penalties that would include the sale of Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and prevent Android from benefiting from its search engine.
The sale of Chrome “will permanently end Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines to gain access to the browser that is the gateway to the Internet for many users,” Justice Department lawyers argued in their filing.
Although regulators stopped short of requiring Google to sell Android as well, they said the judge should have made it clear that the company could ask to scrap its phone operating system if its oversight board continues to see evidence of misconduct.
The broad scope of the recommended penalties underscores the severity with which regulators acting under President Joe Biden’s administration believe they should punish Google. August verdict U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled the company a monopoly.
Justice Department decision makers who will inherit the case after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year it may not be so strict. Google’s sentencing hearings in Washington DC begin in April and Mehta aims to issue his final decision before Labor Day.
If Mehta accepts the government’s recommendations, Google would be forced to sell its 16-year-old Chrome browser within six months of the final ruling. But the company would certainly appeal any sentence, prolonging a legal battle that has lasted more than four years.
In addition to seeking a Chrome spin-off and a tangle of Android software, the Justice Department wants the judge to bar Google from making multibillion-dollar deals to block its main search engine as the default option on Apple’s iPhone and other devices. It would also prohibit Google from advocating for its own services, such as YouTube or its recently launched artificial intelligence platform Gemini.
Regulators also want Google to license the search index data it collects from people’s queries to its rivals, giving it more room to compete with the tech giant. On the commercial side of its search engine, Google should be more transparent about how it sets the prices advertisers pay to be listed at the top of certain targeted search results.
Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, attacked the Justice Department for pursuing a “radical interventionist agenda that will harm Americans and America’s global technology.” In a blog post, Walker warned that the “overbroad proposal” would threaten personal privacy by undermining Google’s leadership in artificial intelligence, “perhaps the most important innovation of our time.”
Wary of Google’s increasing use of artificial intelligence in its search results, regulators also advised Mehta that websites will be able to protect their content from Google’s AI training techniques.
The measures, if enacted, threaten to upend a business that will generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year.
“The playing field is unlevel because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the gains from an illegally acquired advantage,” the Justice Department said in its recommendations. “The remedy must close this loophole and remove these benefits from Google.”
The Justice Department may yet ease its efforts to crack down on Google, especially if Trump makes the long-awaited move to replace Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter.
Even if the case was originally aimed at Google It was introduced in the final months of Trump’s first termKanter oversaw the high-profile trial that culminated in Mehta’s verdict against Google. Working alongside Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan, Kanter took a tough line against Big Tech, which led to another crackdown attempt. industrial powerhouse such as Apple and advised to make many business deals in the last four years.
Trump recently expressed concern that a breach could destroy Google, but did not elaborate on the alternative sanctions he might have in mind. “What you can do without breaking this is to make sure it’s fairer,” Trump said last month. Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman whom Trump nominated to be the next US attorney general, has applied before. Disruption of Big Tech companies
Gaetz it faces a tough listening confirmation.
This latest presentation gave Kanter and his team one last chance to determine the measures needed to regain competitiveness in search. Six weeks after the justice presented the idea of the breach, in a preliminary outline of possible penalties.
But Kanter’s proposal already raises questions about whether regulators want to impose controls that extend beyond the issues covered in last year’s trial, and by extension, Mehta’s ruling.
One of the main practices that troubled Mehta in his ruling was the ban on default search contracts that pay Google more than $26 billion annually.
It’s not so clear whether the judge thinks the Justice Department should pull Chrome from Google, or that Android should be completely walled off from its search engine.
“It probably goes a little further,” Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of the Chrome breach. “The remedies must correspond to the harm, they must correspond to the transgression. That seems a little beyond the pale.’
Google rival DuckDuckGo, whose executives testified at last year’s trial, asserted that the Justice Department is only doing what it needs to do to keep an unscrupulous monopolist in check.
“Dismantling Google’s overlapping and widespread illegal conduct over more than a decade requires more than contractual restrictions: it requires a variety of remedies to create sustainable competition,” Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s senior vice president of public affairs, said in a statement.
The attempt to break Google echoes a similar penalty originally imposed on Microsoft a quarter-century ago, and comes after a federal judge concluded in another landmark trial that the software maker illegally used its Windows operating system for computers to stifle competition.
However, an appeals court overturned an order that would have struck down Microsoft, a precedent many experts believe will make Mehta reluctant to follow a similar path with the Google case.
