After a court determined that Google had an oppressive monopoly for the previous ten years, U.S. officials want a federal judge to disband the firm so it can stop stifling competition with its dominant search engine.
The U.S. Department of Justice released a 23-page document late Wednesday outlining the proposed split.
It calls for broad penalties, such as the sale of Google’s market-leading Chrome browser and limitations to stop Android from favoring its own search engine.
In their petition, Justice Department attorneys contended that a sale of Chrome “will permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”
Regulators said the judge should make it clear that Google might still be forced to sell its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee finds more evidence of wrongdoing, even if they refrained from requiring that the corporation sell Android as well.
Laptops 1000The recommended sanctions’ wide range highlights how harshly regulators working under President Joe Biden’s administration feel Google should be penalized in the wake of a U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s August decision designating the corporation as a monopolist.
Decision-makers in the Justice Department who will be left with the case when President-elect Donald Trump assumes office next year may not be as adamant.
Mehta hopes to make his final ruling before Labor Day, and the court hearings on Google’s punishment are set to start in April in Washington, D.C.
Within six months of the final decision, Google would have to stop selling its 16-year-old Chrome browser if Mehta adopts the government’s suggestions.
However, the corporation would undoubtedly contest any penalty, which may extend a legal battle that has been going on for over four years.
The Justice Department wants the judge to prohibit Google from entering into multibillion-dollar agreements to lock in its dominant search engine as the default option on Apple’s iPhone and other devices, in addition to requesting a Chrome spinoff and a restraining of the Android software.
Additionally, it would prohibit Google from giving preference to its own services, such YouTube or Gemini, its recently introduced artificial intelligence platform.
In order to give its competitors a better chance of competing with the tech giant, regulators also want Google to grant licenses to its competitors for the search index data it gathers from users’ searches.
Google would have to be more open about how it determines the costs that advertisers pay to appear near the top of some targeted search results on the commercial side of its search engine.
Laptops 1000The Justice Department is pursuing “a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology,” according to Google Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker.
Walker cautioned in a blog post that the “overly broad proposal” would jeopardize individual privacy and discredit Google’s pioneering work in artificial intelligence, “perhaps the most important innovation of our time.”
Regulators also cautioned Mehta to make sure websites can protect their content from Google’s AI training methods, given the company’s growing usage of AI in search results.
A company that is predicted to make over $300 billion this year could be completely upended if the restrictions are implemented.
In its recommendations, the Justice Department claimed that “Google’s behavior has created an uneven playing field, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired.”
“The solution must eliminate this disparity and deny Google these benefits.”
There is still a chance that the Justice Department may slow down its efforts to dismantle Google, particularly if Trump replaces Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who Biden nominated to lead the department’s antitrust division.
Kanter presided over the well-publicized trial that resulted in Mehta’s decision against Google, despite the fact that the lawsuit against the company was initially brought in the last months of Trump’s first term in office.
With Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Kanter adopted a tough-on-Big Tech approach that deterred numerous commercial transactions over the previous four years and led to additional attempts at crackdowns on industry titans like Apple.
Trump recently voiced worries that a split may ruin Google, but he didn’t go into detail about other sanctions he might be considering.
Trump stated last month that “making it more equitable is what you can do without breaking it up.” Trump’s nominee for the future U.S. Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, a former Republican congressman, has called for the dissolution of Big Tech firms.
Kanter and his team had one last opportunity to outline the steps they believe are necessary to restore competition in search with this most recent filing. It occurs six weeks after Justice originally suggested a breakup in an initial draft of possible sanctions.
However, the question of whether regulators aim to impose controls that go beyond the topics discussed in the trial last year and, consequently, Mehta’s decision is already being raised by Kanter’s proposal.
One of the primary practices that bothered Mehta in his decision was the prohibition of the default search agreements, which Google currently spends over $26 billion a year to maintain.
It’s unclear if the judge will agree with the Justice Department’s argument that Android should be totally cut off from its search engine and/or Chrome should be separated from Google.
Regarding the Chrome split, Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh stated, “It is probably going a little beyond.” “The remedies ought to be commensurate with the harm and the offense.” This certainly appears to be a bit over the top.
During last year’s trial, officials from Google rival DuckDuckGo testified that the Justice Department is merely taking necessary action to restrain a blatant monopolist.
Kamyl Bazbaz, senior vice president of public relations at DuckDuckGo, stated that “ending Google’s overlapping and pervasive illegal conduct over more than a decade requires more than contract restrictions: it requires a range of remedies to create enduring competition.”
Attempting to dismantle Google is reminiscent of a similar penalty that was first applied to Microsoft 25 years ago after a significant antitrust lawsuit in which a federal judge found that the software developer had unlawfully used his Windows operating system for PCs to suppress competition.
An order that would have dismantled Microsoft was overruled by an appeals court, though, and many experts predict that Mehta will be hesitant to follow suit in the Google case.
