The US Department of Justice has proposed a range of punchy remedies to address Google’s dominance of the internet search market, including the forced divestment of its Chrome browser.
Google said the proposals represented a “radical interventionist agenda” that would harm America’s standing as a tech superpower.
Big tech’s power, and whether and how it should be tamed, has become a political and regulatory talking point on both sides of the Atlantic. This will be one of the defining confrontations of that debate.
What is the Department of Justice proposing?
The DoJ has asked a federal judge to consider several remedies following a ruling in August that found Google was operating an illegal monopoly in the search market.
The main proposal is to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser – a key gateway to its search engine and the most popular browser in the US. Other proposed remedies include making Google’s search index, a database of all the webpages it has crawled, available to rivals at marginal cost; scrapping payments to third parties to make Google the default search engine on their products; and giving publishers and content creators the ability to block their data from being used to train its artificial intelligence models.
Will the remedies work if they are implemented?
Advocates for strong measures against big tech companies are delighted with the proposals. For instance, Chrome could be opened up to other search engines under new ownership, and rival services could use the search index to build competitive rivals to Google.
“These remedies will have an impact,” says Courtney Radsch, the director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly thinktank. “These are not just tweaks around behaviour. They are structural remedies that seek to break up the advantages that Google has across its product lines and really entrench its market power.”
Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer, Kent Walker, has said the proposals will harm Americans and the country’s leadership in the global tech industry. Google has also said it will appeal against the monopoly ruling.
What next?
The judge overseeing the case, Amit Mehta, will also hear remedy proposals from Google, and is expected to make a final decision by August next year. However, either side could appeal and take the process as far as the highest court in the US, the supreme court. William Kovacic, a professor at George Washington University law school, says this could push the resolution of the case to the end of 2027.
According to Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt law school, a forced sale of Chrome could also be difficult.
“The spin-off of Chrome is possible but an uphill battle,” she says. “This judge is very careful and mindful of precedent, and there is not a lot of recent precedent of spin-offs. That doesn’t foreclose the option to him, but maybe makes it a little harder.”
What will Donald Trump do?
As the president-elect, Donald Trump can stop the investigation, order an alteration of the remedies – or let the process carry on uninterrupted. The DoJ case against Google started under the previous Trump administration, but the incoming president has indicated recently that he is against a break-up, saying splitting the company is a “very dangerous thing” that could play into the hands of China. The vice president-elect, JD Vance, has voiced support for breaking up Google.
“We have had such mixed messages from the Trump cohort,” says Kovacic.