US regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to stop the company from continuing to crush competition through its dominant search engine, after a court ruled it had maintained an abusive monopoly over the past decade .
The proposed breakup is contained in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice, calling for tough sanctions that would include the sale of Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and the imposition of restrictions on prevent Android from favoring its own search engine.
The sale of Chrome “will permanently end Google’s control over this critical search access point and allow competing search engines access to the browser that, for many users, is a gateway to the Internet,” the researchers argued. Department of Justice lawyers in their case.
Although regulators did not require Google to also sell Android, they said the judge should make clear that the company could still be required to divest its smartphone operating system if its oversight board continues to find problems. evidence of misconduct.
The scale of the recommended sanctions underscores the extent to which regulators operating under President Joe Biden’s administration believe Google should be punished following an August ruling by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who called the monopoly enterprise.
Justice Department policymakers who will inherit the case after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year may not be so strident. Washington court hearings on Google’s sanction are expected to begin in April, and Mehta hopes to issue his final decision before Labor Day.
If Mehta accepted the government’s recommendations, Google would be forced to sell its 16-year-old Chrome browser within six months of the final decision. But the company would likely appeal any sanctions, which could prolong a legal battle that has lasted for more than four years.
In addition to seeking a Chrome spinoff and Android software consolidation, the Justice Department wants the judge to bar Google from entering into multibillion-dollar deals to lock its dominant search engine as the default option on the Apple iPhone and other devices. It would also prohibit Google from prioritizing 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 user queries to rivals, giving them a better chance of competing with the tech giant. On the business side of its search engine, Google would be required to provide more transparency about how it sets the prices advertisers pay to appear at the top of certain targeted search results.
Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, blasted the Justice Department for pursuing “a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and American global technology.” In a blog post, Walker warned that the “overly broad proposal” would threaten privacy while undermining Google’s early leadership in artificial intelligence, “perhaps the most important innovation of our time.”
Wary of Google’s growing use of artificial intelligence in its search results, regulators also advised Mehta to ensure that websites will be able to protect their content from Google’s AI training techniques .
These measures, if ordered, threaten to upend a business expected to generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year.
“The playing field is not level due to Google’s behavior, and Google’s standing reflects the ill-gotten gains of an illegally acquired advantage,” the Justice Department said in its recommendations. “The remedy must fill this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”
It’s still possible that the Justice Department will tone down attempts to break up Google, especially if Trump takes the widely expected step of replacing Deputy Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who Biden appointed to oversee the agency’s antitrust division.
Although the case targeting Google was initially filed in the final months of Trump’s first term, Kanter oversaw the high-profile trial that resulted in Mehta’s ruling against Google. Working in tandem with Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, Kanter took a tough stance against big tech, which sparked other crackdowns on industrial powerhouses like Apple and discouraged many commercial transactions over the past four years.
Trump recently expressed fears that a split could destroy Google, but did not specify what alternative sanctions he might have in mind. “What you can do without breaking it is make sure it’s fairer,” Trump said last month. Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman who Trump nominated to be the next U.S. attorney general, has previously called for the breakup of big tech companies.
Gaetz faces a tough confirmation hearing.
This latest filing gave Kanter and his team one last chance to define the measures they believe are necessary to restore competition in the research field. It comes six weeks after Justice first floated the idea of a breakup in a preliminary overview of potential sanctions.
But Kanter’s proposal already raises questions about whether regulators are seeking to impose controls that extend beyond the issues covered in last year’s lawsuit and, by extension, Mehta’s ruling.
Banning default search deals for which Google now pays more than $26 billion a year was one of the key practices that troubled Mehta in his decision.
It is less clear whether the judge will accept the Justice Department’s contention that Chrome should be separated from Google and/or Android should be completely isolated from its search engine.
“It probably goes a little further,” Shubha Ghosh, a law professor at Syracuse University, said of Chrome’s breakup. “The remedies must be commensurate with the harm, they must be commensurate with the transgression. This seems a little beyond that.
Google rival DuckDuckGo, whose executives testified at last year’s trial, argued that the Justice Department was simply doing what needed to be done to rein in a brazen monopolist.
“Ending Google’s widespread and repeated illegal behavior spanning more than a decade requires more than contractual restrictions: it requires a series of solutions to create sustainable competition,” said Kamyl Bazbaz, senior vice president of public affairs at Google. DuckDuckGo, in a press release.
The attempt to break up Google is reminiscent of a similar sanction initially imposed on Microsoft a quarter-century ago, following another major antitrust trial that resulted in a federal judge ruling that the software company had used illegally its Windows operating system for PCs in order to stifle competition.
However, an appeals court overturned an order that would have broken up Microsoft, a precedent that many experts believe will deter Mehta from going down a similar path with the Google case.
