THE NEW YORK TIMES: US proposes breakup of Google to fix search monopoly

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. 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 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.

In a sweeping filing, the government also asked the judge to stop Google from entering into paid agreements with Apple and others to be the automatically selected search engine on smartphones and in browsers. Google should also be required by the court to allow rival search engines to display the company’s results and access its data for a decade, the government said.

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 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 and Android would be among the worst possible outcomes for Google. Chrome, which was introduced in 2008 and is free to use, is the most popular web browser in the world, with an estimated 67% of the global browser market, according to Statcounter, which compiles tech market data. Google’s search engine is bundled into Chrome.

Android is the world’s most popular mobile software, with an estimated 71% of the market, according to Statcounter. The system is open-source, meaning that Samsung and other phone manufacturers do not have to pay Google for its use. But most Android devices come with Google’s apps already installed.

Both are part of an elaborate Google ecosystem that keeps people using the company’s products.

“The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired,” the government said in the filing. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”

Legal experts said that the request to force the sale of Chrome could be met with scepticism by 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 Mehta is expected to hear arguments on the remedies this spring. He is expected to rule by the end of the summer.

Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, called the government’s proposal “extreme.”

“D.O.J.’s wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the court’s decision,” he said in a blog post. “It would break a range of Google products — even beyond Search — that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives.”

A spokesperson 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 Trump. Some of the antitrust lawsuits began during Trump’s first administration.

The government’s victory in the Google search case followed a 10-week trial last year. Justice Department lawyers said 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. It said 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.

The government also asked the judge to force Google to shed any stakes in artificial intelligence companies that control technology that could compete with search engines. Generative AI has emerged as the next big playing field in tech, and Google has already integrated its own AI into search results.

Google is an investor in Anthropic, an AI startup that makes a chatbot called Claude. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

Publishers and website owners should also have the ability to opt out of Google’s AI models using that content for training, the government said in its filing.

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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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