The US government is considering seeking the break-up of Google to end its monopoly in search in what would be the boldest effort yet to rein in one of the world’s most powerful tech companies.
The potential remedy was set out by the US department of justice on Tuesday and comes after federal prosecutors won a landmark case in August, when a judge ruled Google had violated US antitrust law and branded the company a “monopolist”.
In a court document detailing the sanctions that the DoJ might seek from Amit Mehta, the judge presiding over the case, prosecutors said they were “considering behavioural and structural remedies” that would prevent Google from using products such as the Chrome browser, Play app store and Android operating system to give its search engine an edge over competitors or new entrants.
The DoJ could also seek to force Google to share users’ search data with rivals and restrict its ability to use search results to train new generative artificial intelligence models and products.
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A break-up of Google would reorder a search market in which the company handles more than 90 per cent of online queries and would transform a business that has made its parent company, Alphabet, one of the most valuable in the world.
“For more than a decade, Google has controlled the most popular distribution channels, leaving rivals with little-to-no incentive to compete for users,” the DoJ said. “Fully remedying these harms requires not only ending Google’s control of distribution today, but also ensuring Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow.”
In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google had spent tens of billions of dollars on exclusive deals to maintain an illegal dominance over search.
Google hit back at the proposed remedies, calling them “radical and sweeping”, beyond the scope of the legal issues in the case and a threat to “consumers, businesses and American competitiveness”.
Shares of Alphabet were little changed in after-hours trading on Tuesday and have risen 19 per cent this year to give it a market value of $2 trillion (€1.8 trillion), the fourth largest for a listed company in the world.
The Google case could potentially be the biggest antitrust victory for the DoJ since a judge ordered the break-up of Microsoft 24 years ago for illegally squashing competition.
However, that ruling was overturned on appeal a year later, making the Google lawsuit a second chance for the DoJ to fundamentally dismantle a Big Tech company’s dominance of a key sector.
As part of the second phase of the Google trial, the DoJ and Google are set to file their proposed final judgments and witness lists on November 20th and December 20th, respectively.
Judge Mehta has set hearings for the remedy requests in April and has said he aims to hand down a decision by August 2025. Google has vowed to appeal against the decision as far as the US supreme court, which could take years longer.
The second phase of the trial will be a critical test for Jonathan Kanter, who inherited the case and has ushered in a tougher enforcement policy in the past three years as head of the DoJ’s antitrust unit.
Mr Kanter has sued Apple and has a second case against Google’s ad tech business in progress. Big Tech critic Lina Khan, chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, has challenged Amazon and Meta in separate cases. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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