The US government formally proposed a partial breakup of Google on Wednesday, urging a federal judge to force a sale of the company’s Chrome web browser after a landmark ruling this year found that Google had violated US antitrust law with its search business.
The request by the Justice Department and a group of states opens the door to the most significant antitrust penalties for a tech giant in a generation, targeting not only Google’s illegal monopoly in search but also its growing ambitions in artificial intelligence.
If approved, the penalties could revolutionize how millions of Americans search for information and potentially disrupt the tight integration among many of Google’s key products and services. Google has promised to appeal; the company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday’s filing.
The high-profile case focused on whether the tactics that made Google the default search engine in Chrome – as well as on iPhones, Android devices and more – were anticompetitive, shutting out smaller search engines from the market.
In their court filing this week, antitrust enforcers said a spinoff of Chrome, which is used on billions of devices worldwide, could help prevent an illegal monopoly from recurring.
“The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired,” the government lawyers wrote. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”
They added that the court should ban agreements such as Google’s exclusive, multi-year contracts with Apple, Samsung and others that made Google the default search engine on their devices. District Judge Amit Mehta said in an August ruling that such agreements helped cement Google’s dominance in violation of federal law.
And Google should be required to syndicate its US search results to other rival search engines for the next decade, officials said in their filing, a move that could put other search alternatives on more even footing with Google.
DOJ lawyers called on Mehta to impose a range of other restrictions, some aimed at preventing possible future harm. One such request would require Google to give websites the option not to have their data collected for training the company’s artificial intelligence tools.
Testifying in the case last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned of a “nightmare” future for AI if Google were permitted to translate the billions of search queries it processes every day into training data for its AI models. Microsoft has struggled to compete with Google using its own search engine, Bing, and is a leading rival to Google in AI thanks to an exclusive partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
FROM CNN
