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The proposed termination was floated in a 23-page document filed by the US Department of Justice late on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT) and calls for tough penalties that would include selling Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and imposing restrictions to prevent Android favors its own search engine.
The sale of Chrome “will permanently end Google’s control over this critical search access point and allow competing search engines access to the browser that is the gateway to the Internet for many users,” Justice Department lawyers argued in their filing.
While regulators did not require Google to sell Android as well, they said the judge should make clear that the company could still be asked to give up its smartphone operating system if its watchdog continued to see evidence of misconduct.
The broad scope of the recommended penalties underscores how harshly regulators operating under President Joe Biden’s administration believe Google should be punished after US District Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling in August that branded the company a monopolist.
Justice Department decision makers who will inherit the case after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year may not be so harsh. Court hearings in Washington, DC on Google’s penalty are scheduled to begin in April, and Mehta intends to announce his final decision before Labor Day.
If Mehta accepts the government’s recommendations, Google will be forced to sell its 16-year-old Chrome browser within six months of the final ruling. But the company would certainly appeal the sentence, potentially prolonging a legal dispute that has dragged on for more than four years.
In addition to seeking a Chrome spinoff and Android software tie-up, the Justice Department wants a judge to bar Google from making multibillion-dollar deals to lock its dominant search engine as the default option on Apple’s iPhone and other devices. It would also prohibit Google from favoring its own services, such as YouTube or its recently launched artificial intelligence platform, Gemini.
Regulators also want Google to license the search index data it collects from people’s queries to its competitors, giving them a better chance of competing with the tech giant.
On the commercial side of its search engine, Google should provide more transparency in how it sets the prices advertisers pay to appear at the top of some targeted search results.
Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, attacked the Justice Department for pursuing a “radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and American global technology.”
Wary of Google’s increasing use of artificial intelligence in search results, regulators also advised Mehta to ensure that websites would be able to protect their content from Google’s AI training techniques.
The measures, if imposed, threaten to derail a business that is expected to generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year.
“The playing field is not level because of Google’s behavior, and Google’s quality reflects an ill-gotten advantage,” the Justice Department said in its recommendations.
“The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”
It’s still possible that the Justice Department could soften efforts to crack down on Google, especially if Trump takes the expected step of firing Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who Biden appointed to oversee the agency’s antitrust division.
Although the case against Google was originally brought during the final months of Trump’s first term in office, Kanter oversaw the high-profile trial that culminated in Mehta’s ruling against Google.
Working in tandem with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan, Kanter has taken a tough line against Big Tech that has sparked other attempts to crack down on industry powerhouses like Apple and discouraged many business deals over the past four years.
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Trump recently expressed concern that a termination could destroy Google, but he did not elaborate on the alternative punishments he might have in mind.
“What you can do without breaking it is make sure it’s fairer,” Trump said last month.
Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman nominated by Trump to be the next US attorney general, has previously called for the breakup of big tech companies.
Gaetz faces a tough confirmation hearing.
This latest filing gave Kanter and his team one last chance to outline the measures they believe are needed to restore competition in search.
It comes six weeks after Justice first floated the idea of a break in a preliminary draft of possible sentences.
But Kanter’s proposal already raises questions about whether regulators want to impose controls that extend beyond the issues covered by last year’s trial, and — by extension — Mehta’s ruling.
The ban on default search arrangements that Google now pays more than $US26 billion ($40 billion) to maintain was one of the main practices that bothered Mehta in his ruling.
It is less clear whether the judge will accept the Justice Department’s contention that Chrome should be spun off from Google or that Android should be completely separated from its search engine.
“It probably goes a little further,” Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of Chrome’s breakup.
“Medicines should fit the harm, they should fit the offense. This seems a bit out of line.”
Google rival DuckDuckGo, whose executives testified during last year’s trial, argued that the Justice Department was simply doing what it needed to do to rein in the brazen monopolist.
“Undoing Google’s overlap and widespread illegal behavior over more than a decade requires more than contractual restrictions: it requires a series of remedies to create lasting competition,” Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s senior vice president of public affairs, said in a statement.
The attempt to crack down on Google harkens back to a similar punishment originally handed down to Microsoft a quarter-century ago after another major antitrust trial that culminated in a federal judge’s ruling that the software maker illegally used its Windows PC operating system to stifle competition.
However, an appeals court overturned an order that would have crushed Microsoft, a precedent that many experts believe will make Mehta hesitant to follow a similar path with the Google case.
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