US regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to stifle competition through its dominant search engine after a court found it had maintained an unlawful monopoly for the past decade.
The proposed breach emerged in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the US Department of Justice, which calls on Google to sell its flagship Chrome web browser and impose restrictions designed to prevent the Android smartphone software prefers the search engine.
The recommended penalties underscore how harshly regulators operating under President Biden believe Google should be punished following an August ruling by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta that branded Google as a monopolist. The Justice Department decision-makers who will inherit the case after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year may not be so strident. Court hearings in Washington DC on Google’s punishment will begin in April and Mehta aims to deliver his final decision before Labor Day.
If Mehta embraces the Justice Department’s recommendations, Google will almost certainly appeal the penalties, extending a legal battle that has dragged on for more than four years.
In addition to seeking a Chrome spinoff and rounding up the Android software, the Justice Department wants a judge to ban Google from entering into multibillion-dollar contracts to make its dominant search engine a default option on Apple’s iPhone and other devices.
Regulators also want Google to share the data it collects from people’s searches with its rivals, giving them a better chance to compete with the tech giant.
If the measures are ordered, they threaten to upend a company expected to generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year — a money machine that Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.
“The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an illegally obtained advantage,” the Justice Department said in its recommendations. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these benefits.”
It’s still possible that the Justice Department could weaken efforts to break up Google, especially if Trump makes the widely expected move to replace Jonathan Kanter, who was appointed by Biden to oversee the agency’s antitrust division .
Although the case against Google was originally filed during the final months of Trump’s first term, Kanter oversaw the high-profile trial that culminated in Mehta’s ruling against Google. Working with Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Kanter took a strong stance against Big Tech, prompting other crackdown efforts on industry powerhouses like Apple and discouraging business deals over the past four years.
Trump recently expressed concern that a breakup could destroy Google, but did not elaborate on the alternative punishments he might have in mind. “What you can do without breaking it up is make it more fair,” Trump said last month. Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman whom Trump nominated as the next US attorney general, has previously called for the breakup of Big Tech companies.
Gaetz, a Trump firebrand, faces a difficult confirmation hearing.
This latest filing gave Kanter and his team a final chance to formulate measures they believe are necessary to restore competition in search. It comes six weeks after the Justice Department first raised the idea of a break in a preliminary overview of possible sentences.
But Kanter’s proposal is already raising questions about whether regulators want to impose controls beyond the issues raised in last year’s lawsuit and — by extension — Mehta’s ruling.
Banning the standard search deals for which Google now pays more than $26 billion annually was one of the key practices that alarmed Mehta in his ruling.
It’s less clear whether the judge will embrace the Justice Department’s contention that Chrome should be taken out of Google and Android separated from the company’s other services.
The effort to break up Google harkens back to a similar punishment initially imposed on Microsoft a quarter-century ago after another major antitrust lawsuit that culminated in a federal judge ruling that the software maker had illegally used its Windows operating system for PCs to stiffen competition to suppress.
However, an appeals court has overturned an order that would have broken up Microsoft, a precedent that many experts say will make Mehta reluctant to take a similar path with the Google case.
