The Justice Department and a group of states asked a federal court late Wednesday to force Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, a move that could fundamentally alter the $2 trillion company’s business and reshape competition on the internet.
The request follows a landmark ruling in August by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that found Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search. Judge Mehta asked the Justice Department and the states that brought the antitrust case to submit solutions by the end of Wednesday to correct the search monopoly.
Beyond the sale of Chrome, the government asked Judge Mehta to give Google a choice: either sell Android, its smartphone operating system, or bar Google from making its services mandatory on phones that use Android to operate. If Google broke those terms, or the remedies failed to improve competition, the government could force the company to sell Android at a later date.
The government also asked the judge to stop Google from entering into paid agreements with Apple and others to be the automatic search engine on smartphones and in browsers. Google should also be required to give access to the company’s search result data for 10 years, something to help competitors catch up to the quality of Google’s product.
The proposals are the most significant remedies requested in a tech antitrust case since the Justice Department asked to break up Microsoft in 2000. If Judge Mehta adopts the proposals, they will set the tone for a string of other antitrust cases that challenge the dominance of tech behemoths, including Apple, Amazon and Meta.
Being forced to sell Chrome would be among the worst possible outcomes for Google. Chrome, which is free to use, is the most popular web browser in the world and part of an elaborate Google ecosystem that keeps people using the company’s products. Google’s search engine is bundled into Chrome.
Google launched the browser in 2008 to drive traffic to the company’s search engine, breaking into a market controlled at the time by Microsoft’s Explorer. Chrome is now available as an app across most devices. It has an estimated 67 percent of the global browser market, according to Statcounter, which compiles tech market data.
Legal experts said that the request to force the sale of Chrome could be met with skepticism by Judge Mehta, in part because the government’s attempted breakup of Microsoft in the 2000s was overturned by an appeals court.
“That’s going to be an uphill climb for the government,” said Doug Melamed, a visiting fellow at Stanford Law School who worked in the Justice Department’s antitrust division during the Microsoft case.
Google is set to file its own suggestions for fixing the search monopoly by Dec. 20. Both sides can modify their requests before Judge Mehta is expected to hear arguments on the remedies this spring. He is expected to rule by the end of the summer.
“The D.O.J. continues to push a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president for regulatory affairs at Google, said in a statement this week after details of the government’s discussions were reported publicly. “The government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.”
A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.
Regulators have in recent years cracked down on the power of the biggest tech companies. The Justice Department has also sued Google over its dominance in advertising technology, and Apple for making it difficult for consumers to leave its tightly knit universe of devices and software. The Federal Trade Commission has separately sued Amazon and Meta, accusing them of anticompetitive behavior and stifling rivals.
It is unclear if these efforts will continue under President-elect Donald J. Trump. Some of the antitrust lawsuits began during his first administration.
The government’s victory in the Google search case followed a 10-week trial last year. Justice Department lawyers said that Google had locked out rivals by signing deals with Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and others to be the default search engine that appears when users open a smartphone or a new tab in a web browser. In total, Google paid $26.3 billion as part of those deals in 2021, according to evidence presented at the trial.
The government argued that those deals entrenched Google’s power, guaranteeing that its search traffic was robust. The company then used the data it gathered to make its search engine better, which kept customers coming back.
Google argued that its deals had not broken the law and that users chose Google because it was better than search engines like Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo at finding information.
The states and the Justice Department were still deciding what to ask for right up to the Wednesday deadline to file their request, according to three people familiar with the talks.
On Monday, a federal judge will hear closing arguments in the second major antitrust trial against Google — the one involving advertising technology — in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The post U.S. Proposes Breakup of Google to Fix Search Monopoly appeared first on New York Times.
