The Department of Justice will ask a federal judge Wednesday to consider breaking up Google, months after the technology giant was found to have illegally monopolized the online search market by spending billions of dollars on deals with manufacturers that required it to be their default search engine.
Bloomberg News reported that the department will file a petition asking Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to consider forcing Google to sell its Chrome browser or Android mobile operating system and to target default web browser contracts and data-sharing agreements.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president of Google’s regulatory affairs, said the Justice Department is pushing a “radical agenda that goes far beyond legal issues in this case.” Government intervention, she said, would “harm customers, developers and American technological leadership.”
The high-stakes showdown could reshape the online search market and the emerging artificial intelligence industry. It has been likened to Washington’s unsuccessful 2001 antitrust case to split up Microsoft Corp.
A Google dismemberment would mark the biggest forced breakup of a massive company on antitrust grounds since AT&T in the 1980s.
Chrome is the world’s most widely used web browser with an estimated 3.45 billion users.
In August, Judge Mehta held that Google had gone too far in preserving its monopoly on the search engine market.
He said the billions of dollars the company funneled into agreements to ensure its search engine was the default option boxed out potential competition.
“Google’s distribution agreements foreclose a substantial portion of the general search services market and impair rivals’ opportunities to compete,” Judge Mehta said.
The ruling culminated in a legal battle that started under President Trump.
The Justice Department and 11 state attorneys general filed a complaint in 2020 to stop Google “from unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets and to remedy the competitive harms.”
The push reflected the growing scrutiny of Big Tech and Silicon Valley on Capitol Hill and the focus on the rise of artificial intelligence.
In a 32-page October filing, the Justice Department said, “Google’s anticompetitive conduct resulted in interlocking and pernicious harms that present unprecedented complexities in a highly evolving set of markets.
“These markets are indispensable to the lives of all Americans, whether as individuals or as business owners, and the importance of effectively unfettering these markets and restoring competition cannot be overstated,” it said.
Ms. Mulholland countered that breaking off Chrome or Android would “change their business models, raise the cost of devices, and undermine Android and Google Play in their robust competition with Apple’s iPhone and App Store.”
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor of antitrust law at Vanderbilt University, told Yahoo Finance that a Google breakup is uncertain.
“We don’t know what the judge is going to impose yet,” Ms. Allensworth said. “I see some of these are relatively unlikely, but it makes sense to ask for more than you think you can get. Maybe you hope the judge is going to split the baby somewhere in the middle, and I happen to think the data-sharing part might be in the middle — maybe not the spinoff of Chrome.”
Ms. Allensworth said the lawsuits illustrate how government officials believe they must bring more balance to a loosely regulated marketplace.
“The idea here, I think, is just to recalibrate,” she said.
Aneesh Chopra, chief technology officer under President Obama, said less dramatic options can mitigate the harms. “The provision that didn’t get as much attention, but might actually be the sleeper sort of opportunity is that Google would open up access to its search technology through licensing agreements with third parties,” Mr. Chopra said Tuesday on CNBC. “This could be the most important part of the agreement.
“If there is this opportunity for competitors, new entrants to access that historical technology that is obviously dominating the way we search the internet today, then it might mean more value-added services will come out to make that a more competitive market that regulators are asking for,” he said.
Mr. Chopra said potential harms include the prospect that third-party companies would be worse in protecting consumer privacy.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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