US regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to stifle competition through its dominant search engine after a court found it maintained an abusive monopoly over the past decade.
The proposed breach was floated in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the US Justice Department that calls for sweeping penalties that would include a sale of Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and impose restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine.
A sale of Chrome “would permanently end Google’s control over this critical search access point and allow rival search engines to gain access to the browser that for many users is a gateway to the Internet,” Justice Department lawyers argued in their filing.
Although regulators stopped short of requiring Google to sell Android as well, they argued that the judge should make clear that the company could still be required to divest its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee continues to see evidence of wrongdoing.
The broad scope of the recommended penalties underscores how strictly regulators operating under President Joe Biden’s administration believe Google should be punished following a ruling in August by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta that branded the company a monopolist.
Justice Department policymakers who will inherit the case after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year may not be so tough. Court hearings in Washington DC on Google’s penalty are scheduled to begin in April, and Mehta aims to issue his final decision by Labor Day.
If Mehta embraces the government’s recommendations, Google will 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, potentially prolonging a legal battle that has dragged on for more than four years.
In addition to seeking a Chrome spinoff and a merger of the Android software, the Justice Department wants the judge to bar Google from making multibillion-dollar deals to lock in its dominant search engine as the default on Apple’s iPhone and other devices. It would also prohibit Google from favoring its own services, such as YouTube or its recently launched artificial intelligence platform, Gemini.
Regulators also want Google to license search index data it collects from people’s queries to its rivals, giving them a better chance to compete with the tech giant. On the commercial side of its search engine, Google would be required to provide more transparency in how it sets the prices advertisers pay to appear at the top of some targeted search results.
Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, lashed out at the Justice Department for pursuing “a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology.” In a blog post, Walker warned that the “overbroad proposal” would threaten personal privacy while undermining Google’s early 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 to ensure that websites will be able to protect their content from Google’s AI training techniques.
The measures, if ordered, threaten to upend a company expected to generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year.
“The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an illegally acquired advantage,” the Justice Department argued in its recommendations. “The solution must close this loophole and deprive Google of these benefits.”
It remains possible that the Justice Department could ease efforts to break up Google, especially if Trump takes the widely expected step of replacing Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who was appointed by Biden to oversee the agency’s antitrust division.
Although the suit against Google was originally filed in the final months of Trump’s first term in office, Kanter oversaw the high-profile trial that culminated in Mehta’s verdict against Google. Working with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan, Kanter took a tough stance against Big Tech that sparked other crackdowns on industry powerhouses like Apple and discouraged many business deals from going through over the past four years.
Trump recently expressed concern that a breach could destroy Google, but did not elaborate on alternative punishments he might have in mind. “What you can do without breaking it up is make it fairer,” Trump said last month. Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman whom Trump nominated to be the next US attorney general, has previously called for the break-up of Big Tech companies.
Gaetz faces a tough confirmation hearing.
This latest filing gave Kanter and his team one last chance to spell out measures they believe are necessary to restore competition in search. It comes six weeks after Justice first floated the idea of a breach in a preliminary outline of potential sanctions.
But Kanter’s proposal is already raising questions about whether regulators are seeking to impose controls that go beyond the issues covered in last year’s lawsuit and — by extension — Mehta’s decision.
Banning default search agreements, which Google now pays more than $26 billion annually to maintain, was one of the main practices that concerned Mehta in his ruling.
It’s less clear whether the judge will embrace the Justice Department’s claim that Chrome be spun off from Google, and or Android be completely cut off from its search engine.
“It’s probably going a little overboard,” Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of the Chrome resolution. “The remedies must match the injury, they must match the violation. It seems a little beyond the pale.”
Google rival DuckDuckGo, whose executives testified at last year’s trial, argued that the Justice Department is simply doing what needs to be done to rein in a brazen monopolist.
“Undoing Google’s overlapping and widespread illegal conduct over more than a decade requires more than contract restrictions: it requires a range of means to create sustained competition,” Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s senior vice president of public affairs, said in a statement.
Attempts to break Google date back to a similar penalty originally imposed on Microsoft a quarter-century ago after another major antitrust lawsuit that culminated in a federal judge ruling that the software maker had illegally used its Windows operating system to PCs to stifle the competition.
However, an appeals court overturned a ruling that would have broken up Microsoft, a precedent that many experts believe will make Mehta reluctant to follow a similar path with the Google case.
