U.S. regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to stifle competition from its dominant search engine after a court found the company had maintained an abusive monopoly over the past decade.
The proposed separation was disclosed in a 23-page document filed slow Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice. It calls for wide-ranging penalties, including selling Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and imposing restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine.
A sale of Chrome “will permanently remove Google’s control over this important search access point and allow competing search engines to access the browser, which is a gateway to the Internet for many users,” Justice Department lawyers argued in their lawsuit.
While regulators did not order 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 committee continues to see evidence of wrongdoing.
The broad scope of the recommended penalties underscores how stringent regulators operating under President Joe Biden’s administration believe Google should be punished after U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta issued a ruling in August that branded the company a monopolist became.
Justice Department policymakers who will take over the case after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year may not be as vocal. Court hearings in Washington, DC to punish Google are scheduled to begin in April, and Mehta aims to announce 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 penalty, potentially prolonging a legal battle that has dragged on for more than four years.
In addition to calling for a Chrome spinoff and a curb on Android software, the Justice Department wants the judge to ban Google from faking multibillion-dollar deals to keep its dominant search engine the default option on Apple’s iPhone and other devices. It would also ban Google from favoring 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 users’ searches to its rivals to give them a better chance of competing with the tech giant. On the commercial side of its search engine, Google would need to provide more transparency about how it sets the prices advertisers pay to appear at the top of some targeted search results.
Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, criticized 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 privacy while undermining Google’s early leadership in artificial intelligence, “perhaps the most important innovation of our time.”
Regulators were concerned about Google’s increasing employ of artificial intelligence in its search results and also advised Mehta to ensure that websites can protect their content from Google’s AI training techniques.
If ordered, the measures threaten to upend a company that is expected to generate more than $300 billion in sales this year.
“As a result of Google’s conduct, the playing field is not level, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an ill-gotten advantage,” the Justice Department noted in its recommendations. “The product must close this gap and take away these advantages from Google.”
It’s still possible that the Justice Department could blunt attempts to break up Google, especially if Trump makes the widely expected move and replaces Deputy Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who was tapped by Biden to lead the agency’s antitrust division.
Although the lawsuit against Google was originally filed in the final months of Trump’s first term, Kanter presided over the high-profile trial that culminated in Mehta’s verdict against Google. Working with Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, Kanter took a tougher stance against Big Tech that led to further crackdowns on industry giants like Apple over the past four years and prevented many deals.
Trump recently expressed concerns that a breakup could destroy Google, but did not elaborate on alternative punishments he might have in mind. “What you can do without destroying it is make sure it’s fairer,” Trump said last month. Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman whom Trump nominated to be the next U.S. attorney general, has previously called for breaking up massive tech companies.
Gaetz faces a tough confirmation hearing.
This latest filing gave Kanter and his team a final chance to articulate actions they believe are needed to restore competition in search. It comes six weeks after Justice first floated the idea of a split in a preliminary overview of possible penalties.
But Kanter’s proposal already raises questions about whether regulators are seeking to impose controls that go beyond the issues covered in last year’s trial and, more broadly, Mehta’s ruling.
The ban on standard search contracts, which Google now pays more than $26 billion to maintain, was one of the key practices that troubled Mehta in his ruling.
It’s less clear whether the judge will accept the Justice Department’s contention that Chrome needs to be spun off from Google and/or Android should be cut off from its search engine entirely.
“It probably goes a little beyond that,” Shubha Ghosh, a law professor at Syracuse University, said of Chrome’s breakup. “The remedies should correspond to the harm, they should correspond to the transgression. That seems a little more than pale.”
Google competitor DuckDuckGo, whose executives testified in the trial last year, claimed the Justice Department was merely doing what was necessary to rein in a brazen monopolist.
“Reversing Google’s overlapping and widespread unlawful behavior over more than a decade will require more than just contractual restrictions: it will require a range of remedies to create lasting competition,” said Kamyl Bazbaz, senior vice president of public affairs at DuckDuckGo, in a statement.
The attempt to break up Google follows a similar penalty originally imposed on Microsoft a quarter century ago, after a federal judge ruled in another major antitrust case that the software maker had illegally used its Windows operating system for personal computers to suppress competition.
However, an appeals court overturned an order that would have broken up Microsoft, a precedent that many experts believe will deter Mehta from pursuing a similar path in the Google case.
