US Govt calls for breakup of Google and Chrome to address search monopoly and digital advertising dominance

The US government on Wednesday formally proposed a breakup of Google, urging a federal judge to mandate the sale of the company’s Chrome web browser. This comes after a landmark ruling earlier this year, which found that Google had violated US antitrust laws with its search business.

The request from the Justice Department, along with a group of states, paves the way for some of the most significant antitrust penalties against a tech giant in decades, targeting not only Google’s illegal monopoly in search but also its growing ambitions in artificial intelligence.

These actions are also part of a broader effort to rein in Google’s influence in the search and digital advertising markets. According to Google's latest quarterly report, the company’s search advertising business alone generated a staggering $49.4 billion in revenue in Q3 of 2024.

If approved, these penalties could drastically change how millions of Americans use search engines and disrupt the seamless integration of Google’s key products and services. Google has vowed to appeal, though the company has not yet responded to requests for comment regarding Wednesday’s filing.

Legal battle over Google's search and digital advertising dominance

The high-profile case centered on whether the strategies that made Google the default search engine in Chrome, as well as on iPhones, Android devices, and more, were anticompetitive, effectively blocking smaller search engines from the market. In their court filing this week, antitrust regulators argued that spinning off Chrome, which is used on billions of devices globally, could help prevent the recurrence of an illegal monopoly.

“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 also argued that the court should prohibit agreements like Google’s exclusive, multi-year contracts with Apple, Samsung, and other companies that made Google the default search engine on their devices. District Judge Amit Mehta had previously ruled in August that these agreements played a significant role in solidifying Google’s dominance, in violation of federal law.

Furthermore, the filing suggested that Google should be required to syndicate its US search results to competing search engines for the next ten years, a step that could level the playing field for other search alternatives.

DOJ lawyers urged Judge Mehta to impose a range of additional restrictions, some designed to prevent future harm. One of these requests would require Google to offer websites the option not to have their data collected for training the company’s artificial intelligence tools.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who testified in the case last year, warned of a "nightmare" future for AI if Google were allowed to use the billions of search queries it processes daily as training data for its AI models. Microsoft has faced challenges competing with Google’s search engine, Bing, and is a major rival to Google in AI, thanks to its exclusive partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

The DOJ’s Google Search case, initiated in 2020 under the Trump administration and continued under President Biden, accused Google of using a variety of interlocking tactics and products to block competitors like Bing and DuckDuckGo, leaving consumers with limited choices and stifling innovation in the search engine market.

During a multi-week trial, much of which involved sensitive testimony behind closed doors from executives at Apple, Microsoft, Verizon, and other companies, Judge Mehta considered whether Google’s practices had harmed competition in the search market. He ultimately ruled that Google had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, one of the country’s primary anti-monopoly laws.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his opinion.

The DOJ’s submission outlines a wide range of penalties that the US District Court for the District of Columbia could impose in response to Judge Mehta’s ruling. This filing marks the beginning of a multi-month fact-finding process, expected to conclude with a hearing in April, and a final decision anticipated later in 2025.

The DOJ's requests could significantly disrupt a core part of the internet and one of Google’s oldest and most well-known businesses.

In addition to the proposed divestiture of Chrome, DOJ and state officials also called for Google Search to be separated from Google’s Android mobile operating system and the Google Play app store, though not necessarily through a full breakup or spinoff. Many of the proposals presented in Wednesday’s filing were previewed in an earlier submission to the court in October.

The proposed remedies aim to address the largest antitrust lawsuit to impact the tech industry since the US government’s case against Microsoft in the 1990s—a landmark case that is often seen as paving the way for Google’s rise.

Comparisons to the Microsoft case and potential industry impact

At the time, US antitrust officials accused Microsoft of illegally bundling its Internet Explorer browser with the Windows PC operating system, a move that allegedly stifled competition by preventing rival browsers like Netscape Navigator from gaining a foothold with users.

A settlement with the DOJ in 2001 required Microsoft to share its programming interfaces with other software developers, effectively opening up its platform and creating opportunities for other browser makers to succeed.

This case is often credited with paving the way for Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome browsers, which ultimately enabled Google to promote its search engine to billions of internet users.

The parallels between the Microsoft and Google cases are clear, Judge Mehta noted in his August opinion.

“The end result here is not dissimilar from the Microsoft court’s conclusion as to the browser market,” Mehta said. “Just as the agreements in that case ‘help[ed] keep usage of Navigator below the critical level necessary for Navigator or any other rival to pose a real threat to Microsoft’s monopoly,’ Google’s distribution agreements have constrained the query volumes of its rivals, thereby inoculating Google against any genuine competitive threat.”

Mehta’s decision came just months after a federal jury in California ruled that Google’s app store terms violated US antitrust law and that Google had created an illegal monopoly in Android app distribution. Last month, the judge overseeing that case imposed a three-year injunction, barring Google from several practices, including requiring app developers to use Google’s proprietary payment system for in-app billing. Google has appealed both the jury verdict and the injunction.

While Google challenges the Justice Department on remedies in the search case, the company is also involved in another antitrust battle just across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia.

There, the DOJ is prosecuting Google in a separate federal case, accusing the tech giant of illegally monopolizing the digital advertising technology market—the intricate system that determines which ads appear on websites across the internet.

Filed in 2023, that case went to trial this fall, with closing arguments scheduled for Monday.