US Department of Justice asks court to force Google to ditch Chrome browser for violating antitrust law

() – The US government formally proposed a partial breakup of Google on Wednesday, urging a federal judge to force the sale of the company’s Chrome web browser after a historic ruling this year determined that Google had violated US antitrust law with its search business.

The request from the Department of Justice and a group of states opens the door to the most significant antitrust sanctions for a tech giant in a generation, targeting not only Google’s illegal monopoly in search but also its growing ambitions in artificial intelligence.

If passed, the sanctions could revolutionize the way millions of Americans search for information and potentially disrupt the tight integration between many of Google’s key products and services. Google promised to appeal.

The high-profile case focused on whether the tactics that made Google the default search engine on Chrome, as well as on iPhones, Android devices and more, were anti-competitive, shutting smaller search engines out of the market.

In their court filing this week, antitrust enforcers said a spinoff of Chrome, which is used on billions of devices around the world, could help prevent a repeat of an illegal monopoly.

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

They added that the court should ban agreements like Google’s multi-year exclusive contracts with Apple, Samsung and others that made Google the default search engine on its devices. District Judge Amit Mehta noted in an August ruling that such deals helped cement Google’s dominance in violation of federal law.

And Google should be required to syndicate its US search results to other rival search engines over the next decade, officials said in their filing, a move that could put other search alternatives on a more equal footing with Google.

Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers asked Mehta to impose a series of other restrictions, some aimed at preventing possible future harm. One of those requests would require Google to give websites the option of not having their data collected to train the company’s artificial intelligence tools.

Testifying in the case last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned of a “nightmarish” future for AI if Google were allowed to translate the billions of search queries it processes each day into training data for its Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. Microsoft has struggled to compete with Google using its own search engine, Bing, and is a leading rival to Google in AI thanks to an exclusive partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

In one blog post, Google President and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker called the government proposal “extreme” and said it would undermine the security and privacy of Americans by causing Google to share their user data with others.

“The DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership,” Walker said. “The DOJ’s extremely broad proposal goes far beyond the court’s decision. “It would break a range of Google products, even beyond Search, that people love and find useful in their daily lives.”

Walker added that Google intends to present its own proposal to the court in December, “and will present our broader case next year.”

Filed in 2020 under the first Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden, the Justice Department’s Google Search case alleged that Google had used multiple interlocking tactics and products under its control to block search competitors like Bing and DuckDuckGo, leaving to consumers with few options and a less innovative market for search engines.

Over the course of a weeks-long trial — in which executives from Apple, Microsoft, Verizon and other companies testified behind closed doors — Mehta weighed whether Google’s practices had harmed competition in search. Ultimately, it determined that Google had violated Article 2 of the Sherman Act, one of the most important antitrust laws in the country.

“Google is a monopolist and has acted as such to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his opinion.

The DOJ filing offers a broad menu of sanctions that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia could impose in response to Mehta’s sentencing. The filing sets in motion a months-long investigative process that is expected to culminate in a hearing in April, with a final decision expected by the end of 2025.

The DOJ requests promise to shake up a fundamental part of the Internet and Google’s oldest and best-known business.

In addition to the divestment of Chrome, the Justice Department and state officials also called this week for Google Search to be separated from Google’s Android mobile operating system and the Google Play app store, although not necessarily in the form of a separation or spinoff. . Many of the proposals outlined in Wednesday’s presentation were initially advanced in a previous writing submitted to the court in October.

Google’s proposed remedies aim to resolve the largest antitrust litigation to hit the tech sector since the US government prosecuted Microsoft in the 1990s, a landmark case that is considered to have paved the way for Google’s rise.

At the time, US antitrust authorities accused Microsoft of illegally including its Internet Explorer browser in the Windows operating system for personal computers, a move that allegedly harmed competition by preventing rival browsers such as Netscape Navigator from gaining traction among users.

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A settlement with the DOJ in that case announced in 2001 required Microsoft to share its programming interfaces with other software developers, effectively opening up its platform and giving other browser makers a chance to succeed.

The Microsoft case is credited with paving the way for Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome browsers, which ultimately allowed Google to promote its search engine to billions of Internet users.

The Microsoft parallels in the Google case are clear, Mehta wrote in his August opinion.

“The final result here is no different from the conclusion of the court of Microsoft in terms of the browser market,” Mehta said. Just as the agreements in that case “helped keep Navigator usage below the critical level necessary for Navigator or any other rival to pose a real threat to Microsoft’s monopoly, Google’s distribution agreements have limited the volumes of consultation from its rivals, thus inoculating Google against any real competitive threat.”

Mehta’s decision comes just a few months after a federal jury in California decided that Google’s app store terms violated US antitrust law and that Google has exercised an illegal monopoly on the distribution of Android apps. Last month, the judge overseeing the case imposed a three-year court order which prohibited Google from a number of practices, such as the use of terms that forced app developers to use Google’s own payment system for in-app billing. Google has appealed both the jury verdict and the court order.

While Google fights the Department of Justice in the search case, the company is embroiled in another antitrust battle across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia.

There, the Justice Department is prosecuting Google in another federal court over allegations that the tech giant has illegally monopolized the digital advertising technology marketthe complex ecosystem of companies that determines which ads appear on countless websites across the Internet.

That case, filed in 2023, went to trial this fall, with closing arguments expected to take place Monday.