US regulators seek to break up Google by forcing sale of Chrome as punishment for monopoly

US regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to stop the company from continuing to stifle competition through its dominant search engine after a court found it had maintained an abusive monopoly for the past decade.

The proposed break, outlined in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the US Department of Justice, calls for harsh penalties that would include selling Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and imposing restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine. .

Selling Chrome would “permanently end Google’s control of this critical access point to search and allow rival search engines to gain access to a browser that for many users is the gateway to the Internet,” Justice Department lawyers argued in a filing.

While regulators have stopped short of requiring Google to sell Android, they say the judge should make it clear that the company could still be required to sell its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee continues to see evidence of misconduct.

The wide range of recommended penalties underscores how strictly regulators under President Joe Biden’s administration believe Google should be punished following an August ruling by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta that branded the company a monopolist.

Justice Department decision makers who will inherit the case when President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year may not be so harsh. Court hearings on whether to punish Google in Washington, D.C., will begin in April, and Mehta aims to make a final decision before Labor Day.

If Mehta accepts the government’s recommendations, Google will be forced to sell its 16-year-old Chrome browser within six months of the final decision. But the company will certainly appeal any punishment, potentially prolonging a legal battle that has dragged on for more than four years.

In addition to asking for Chrome to be spun off and Android software to be seized, the Justice Department wants a judge to block Google from making multibillion-dollar deals to cement its dominant search engine as the default option on iPhones and other Apple 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 competitors, giving them a better chance of competing with the tech giant. On the business side of its search engine, Google will have 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 lawyer, criticized 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 a “too broad proposal” would jeopardize privacy while undermining Google’s early leadership in artificial intelligence, “arguably the most important innovation of our time.”

Concerned about Google’s growing use of artificial intelligence in search results, regulators also advised Mehta to ensure that websites can protect their content from Google’s artificial intelligence training techniques.

The measures, if enacted, threaten to devastate a business expected to generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year.

“The playing field is not level due to Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the unfair benefit of an ill-gotten advantage,” the DOJ said in its recommendations. “The remedy should close this gap and deny Google these benefits.”

It’s still possible the Justice Department could ease up on efforts to break up Google, especially if Trump takes the widely expected step of replacing Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, whom Biden appointed to oversee the agency’s antitrust division.

Although the case against Google was initially brought in the final months of Trump’s first term as president, Kanter oversaw the high-profile litigation that culminated in Mehta’s ruling against Google. Working in tandem with Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, Kanter has taken a hard-line stance against big tech companies, prompting other crackdown efforts against industry giants like Apple and scuttling many business deals over the past four years.

Trump recently expressed concern that the breakup could destroy Google, but did not specify what alternative penalties he might have in mind. “What you can do without destroying this process 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 breaking up big tech companies.

Gaetz faces tough confirmation hearings.

This latest filing gives Kanter and his team one last chance to articulate the measures they believe are needed to restore competition in search. It comes six weeks after Justice first floated the idea of ​​ending the relationship in a preliminary outline of possible penalties.

But Kanter’s proposal is already raising questions about whether regulators are seeking to impose controls beyond the issues raised in last year’s lawsuit and the resulting Mehta decision.

Banning default search deals, which Google now pays more than $26 billion a year to maintain, was one of the main practices that bothered Mehta in his decision.

What’s less clear is whether the judge will accept the Justice Department’s contention that Chrome should be separated from Google and Android should be walled off from the search engine entirely.

“There may be more to it than that,” Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of Chrome’s breakup. “Medicines must correspond to the harm, they must correspond to the wrongdoing. It seems to go a little beyond that.”

Google rival DuckDuckGo, whose executives testified at last year’s trial, argues that the Justice Department is simply doing what is necessary to rein in a brazen monopolist.

“Addressing Google’s duplicative and widespread illegal behavior for more than a decade requires more than just contractual restrictions: it requires a range of legal protections to create sustainable competition,” Kamil Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s senior vice president of communications, said in a statement. with the public.

The effort to break up Google harkens back to a similar penalty originally imposed on Microsoft a quarter-century ago after another major antitrust case that culminated in a federal judge ruling that the software maker had illegally used its Windows PC operating system to stifle competition.

But an appeals court overturned the order that would have broken up Microsoft, a precedent many experts say will make Mehta reluctant to go down the same path in the Google case.