US Department of Justice wants to break up Google over monopoly concerns — and Google Chrome and Android are on the chopping block

October 10

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The US Department of Justice has released its proposals for breaking up Google’s alleged monopoly, and Google is not happy with the suggestions.

Among the proposed changes offered by the Department of Justice (DOJ), as reported by Ars Technica, is forcing Google to share its search data with rivals, blocking existing distribution agreements with browser developers like Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, and even forcing the spinning off of Google Chrome and Google Android into separate companies.

According to the DOJ, the remedies proposed by the DOJ would prevent Google from thwarting competition in the search industry, a sector that Google has largely controlled to such an extent that ‘to Google’ has become a recognized verb for searching the internet for information, ostensibly using its search engine.

Not to surprise the reader, but Google is aggressively pushing back against the characterization of the DOJ. According to a Google blog post about the DOJ proposal, the company said that “the government seems to be pursuing a sweeping agenda that will impact numerous industries and products, with significant unintended consequences for consumers, businesses, and American competitiveness.

“The DOJ’s outline also comes at a time when competition in how people find information is blooming,” the company added, “with all sorts of new entrants emerging and new technologies like AI transforming the industry.”

Google is the DOJ’s largest antitrust target ever

Antitrust law in the United States has been a contentious issue for many years now, but the new “proposed remedies” to Google’s effective search monopoly aren’t exactly new, and neither is the US government’s antitrust enforcement against Big Tech.

Famously (and ironically), many of the same arguments made against Google were previously made against Microsoft, who bundled its Internet Explorer search engine into its Windows operating system in the 1990s.

That case was ta watershed litigation when it was brought in 1998, and though it was settled in 2001, it was an era-defining action by the federal government to regulate the actions of one of the largest, and arguably the most important, tech companies in the world at the time.

The case against Google eclipses the case against Microsoft several times over. At the time of the Microsoft settlement in 2001, Microsoft’s annual revenue was just under $23 billion. Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, recorded just under $283 billion in sales in 2023.

The stakes for Google could not be higher then, especially as the DOJ seeks to calve off two of its most important revenue centers, namely Google Chrome and Google Android, which are the most popular web browsers and the most popular operating system in the world as of 2024.

There is still much to be concluded in this case as it moves through the penalty phase after Google was found to have a monopoly over online search, but whatever the outcome, it will have reverberations in the broader tech industry for years, or even decades, to come.