The Department of Justice asks court to force Google to spin off Chrome

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

The request by the Justice Department and a group of states opens the door to the most significant antitrust penalties 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 approved, the penalties could revolutionize how millions of Americans search for information and potentially disrupt the tight integration among many of Google’s key products and services. Google has promised to appeal; the company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday’s filing.

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

In their court filing this week, antitrust enforcers said a spinoff of Chrome, which is used on billions of devices worldwide, could help prevent an illegal monopoly from recurring.

“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 lawyers wrote. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”

They added that the court should ban agreements such as Google’s exclusive, multi-year contracts with Apple, Samsung and others that made Google the default search engine on their devices. District Judge Amit Mehta said in an August ruling that such agreements 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 for the next decade, officials said in their filing, a move that could put other search alternatives on more even footing with Google.

DOJ lawyers called on Mehta to impose a range of other restrictions, some aimed at preventing possible future harm. One such request would require Google to give websites the option not to have their data collected for training the company’s artificial intelligence tools.

Testifying in the case last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned of a “nightmare” future for AI if Google were permitted to translate the billions of search queries it processes every day into training data for its 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.

‘A monopolist’

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

Over the course of a multi-week trial – much of it featuring sensitive testimony behind closed doors by executives from Apple, Microsoft, Verizon and others – Mehta weighed whether Google’s practices had harmed competition in search. He ultimately determined that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, one of the nation’s foremost anti-monopoly laws.

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

The DOJ submission provides a broad menu of penalties that the US District Court for the District of Columbia could impose in response to Mehta’s ruling. The filing kicks off a multi-month fact-finding process that is expected to culminate in a hearing in April, with a final decision expected later in 2025.

The DOJ requests promise to shake up a foundational part of the internet and Google’s oldest, most well-known business.

On top of the Chrome divestiture, DOJ 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, though not necessarily in the form of a breakup or spinoff. Many of the proposals outlined in Wednesday’s filing were initially previewed in an earlier court submission in October.

The proposed Google remedies seek to resolve the biggest antitrust lawsuit to hit the tech industry since the US government prosecuted Microsoft in the 1990s – a historic case widely viewed as paving the way for Google’s own rise in the first place.

At the time, US antitrust officials accused Microsoft of illegally bundling its Internet Explorer browser with the Windows PC operating system, a move that allegedly harmed competition by preventing rival browsers such as Netscape Navigator from gaining traction with users.

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

Clear parallels

The Microsoft case has been 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 end result here is not dissimilar from the Microsoft court’s conclusion as to the browser market,” Mehta said. “Just as the agreements in that case ‘help[ed] keep usage of Navigator 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 constrained the query volumes of its rivals, thereby inoculating Google against any genuine competitive threat.”

Mehta’s decision came just months after a federal jury in California decided that Google’s app store terms violated US antitrust law and that Google has run an illegal monopoly in Android app distribution. Last month, the judge overseeing that case imposed a three-year injunction forbidding Google from a number of practices, such as the use of terms forcing app developers to use Google’s proprietary payment system for in-app billing. Google has appealed the jury verdict as well as the injunction.

Even as Google fights the Justice Department on remedies in the search case, the company is embroiled in another antitrust battle just across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia.

There, the DOJ is prosecuting Google in another federal court over claims the tech giant has illegally monopolized the market for digital advertising technology – the complex ecosystem of businesses that determines which ads appear on countless websites across the internet.

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

This story has been updated with additional context and developments.

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