The United States Department of Justice has proposed a final judgement in its antitrust lawsuit against Google. It asks that Google be forced to sell off the Chrome web browser, and possibly Android.
Google has been in a lawsuit with the federal Department of Justice, in coordination with the several U.S. states and Puerto Rico, over alleged antitrust activates with its search engine and connected products. In August, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in the case that Google is an illegal monopoly in the search engine market, and now the DOJ has submitted its official request for the Judge Mehta to consider.
The judgement asks Google to end its default search engine deals with web browsers, such as the $20 billion paid to Apple in 2022 for Google Search to be the default choice in Safari. It also asks that “Google must promptly and fully divest Chrome” to an approved buyer, and it suggests that the Android operating system may also need to be separated from Google. Google also needs to open its search engine results to competitors at a “marginal cost, and on an ongoing basis,” potentially allowing competitors like DuckDuckGo to use Google results.
The DOJ also wants to block Google from acquiring or working with any company competing with Google Search or “query-based AI product,” and Google must allow publishers to opt out of its AI training and tools without also removing themselves from Google Search, YouTube, and any other platforms owned by Google. There’s already a mechanism for sites to block Google’s AI web crawler separate from its search engine crawler, but that may not be as effective as the DOJ wants, and there’s no similar option for creators on YouTube.
The DOJ hopes these actions will “unfetter the monopolized markets from Google’s exclusionary practices, pry open the monopolized markets to competition, remove barriers to entry, and ensure there remain no practices likely to result in unlawful monopolization of these markets and related markets in the future.”
Google is not happy about any of this. The company published a blog post calling the proposal “a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership.” Google pointed out that the deal would harm Mozilla and other companies that rely on the income from Google’s search engine deals, but it’s possible Judge Mehta could add extra provisions to account for that, or Mozilla could build new features and services with Google’s open data for new revenue streams. Firefox Web Search, anyone?
There’s still plenty of time for the court to make a final ruling, and then Google will almost certainly appeal the decision, so it will probably be a few years before the dust settles. It does seem like big changes are on the way for Google’s tech empire, though.
