DOJ seeks forced sale of Chrome, other big changes at Google in monopoly case
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The Justice Department is seeking to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser and make other major changes to remedy its illegal search monopoly, prosecutors told a Washington court Wednesday, setting a marker in the landmark case before the incoming Trump administration makes its own determinations about how to proceed.
If the court adopts the prosecutors’ recommendation, Google could be the first big tech company broken up under federal antitrust law since AT&T in 1982.
“Google must promptly and fully divest Chrome, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve,” the Justice Department said in its proposed final judgment.
Justice Department prosecutors said in the filing that they are also seeking for the court to require Google to stop favoring its own services in its popular Android mobile operating system, or to be forced to sell off Android as well.
Prosecutors requested a long list of other measures designed to break Google’s search monopoly, including forbidding the company from paying device makers such as Apple to make Google search the default search engine, requiring Google to share its search index with rivals at a low cost and providing online publishers with an easy opt-out from their content being used by Google to train AI models.
Taken together, these measures would be a devastating blow to Google’s current business model, and the kind of harsh antitrust penalties that a major tech company has not faced in decades. It would have a transformative effect on the internet landscape, opening up the race in a range of sectors in which Google is currently a heavyweight.
In response to Wednesday’s filing, Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer, said in a statement that the Justice Department’s proposal was “staggering” and “unprecedented government overreach.”
“DOJ’s wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Court’s decision. It would break a range of Google products - even beyond Search - that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives,” he wrote.
Walker said Google would file its own proposals next month, and make its broader case next year.
Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in August that Google’s search business was an illegal monopoly. Mehta will decide by next summer what remedies to impose on Google to restore competition in the market. Google, which is already planning to appeal, now has a month to respond to the Justice Department’s proposal.
U.S. et al v. Google, the first of a series of big trials against internet giants, has been viewed as a bellwether. Only a handful of major corporations have been taken to court since the 1970s under federal monopoly law.
The prospects of the case are complicated by the imminent transition to a new Trump administration, with the Justice Department’s approach potentially shifting under a new attorney general. Biden’s antitrust enforcers are handing over a string of monopoly cases against Big Tech companies to Trump, after an aggressive four-year run to prosecute the cases. While the Biden administration’s approach has centered on the power of Big Tech companies to stifle competition and control markets, Trump and his advisers have expressed more concern about their power to control public discourse.
Biden’s Justice Department had said last month that it was considering a breakup of Google among its recommendations to Mehta. Days later, Trump told Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait that he feared a breakup might “destroy” Google, noting that “China is afraid of Google.”
“What you can do without breaking it up is make sure that it’s more fair,” Trump said, adding that he had called “the head of Google” recently to complain that more “bad” stories than “good” stories about himself were showing up in Google’s news results. “I think it’s a whole rigged deal.”
In his statement, Google legal officer Walker said, “DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership.”
It is unclear what a shift in emphasis under the incoming administration would mean for these court cases. Some antitrust experts and former enforcers say Trump could seek a settlement in the Google search case rather than await an outcome from the court that he could not control.
There is precedent for such a shift: George W. Bush’s Justice Department settled a major monopoly case against Microsoft, after Clinton administration prosecutors pursued the company’s breakup.
A second Justice Department antitrust case against Google, which revolves around its dominance of the online advertising market, is also underway, with closing arguments to take place Monday at a courthouse in Alexandria, and a judgment expected next year.
Trump’s new antitrust enforcement team has yet to take shape. His pick for attorney general, former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), has just removed himself from consideration.
Gaetz had spoken favorably of the Biden Justice Department’s prosecution of cases against Google and other tech companies. He told Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for antitrust, at a hearing in 2023 that he thought Kanter was “doing a good job,” adding, “that is a painful admission for me to make about anyone who works at the Department of Justice, an entity that I believe has been victimized by political capture.” Gaetz called Kanter’s team’s allegations about Google’s vertical integration of its advertising business “really important.”
Some antitrust experts expected some continuity on the cases, pointing out that the Google search case was initiated by Trump’s first-term Justice Department, though Biden’s brought it to court.
“This case was filed in the last weeks of the Trump administration, so the new team is very unlikely to abandon it,” said Doug Melamed, a former Justice Department antitrust official and now a Stanford Law visiting fellow. “The legal theory in the case is consistent with well-established legal principles and existing law.”
But Trump has also declared that the tech priority of his second term would be to “dismantle the censorship cartel” that he felt suppressed conservative opinions online. He said in 2022 that he would order the Justice Department to investigate companies suspected of participating in “the new online censorship regime.”
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
“The wild card is Trump himself,” said Gary Reback, a veteran antitrust lawyer, adding that Google appeared to be following a standard playbook of appealing to national-security considerations in the technological race against China in seeking to be spared from antitrust punishment.
After hearing again from Google, Mehta is planning to hold an evidentiary hearing in March or April next year and issue his opinion in early August.
Kanter and Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, have departed from decades of light-touch tech enforcement, pursuing a string of monopoly cases against Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon and other tech giants.
“The administration took strong strides to reboot antitrust, to take it back to its origins and original meaning,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and former tech adviser to the Biden White House.
