The Justice Department said Tuesday night that it was considering asking a federal court to force Google to break off parts of the company or change its practices in order to eliminate its monopoly in search, moves that could redefine the $2 trillion company’s core business.
In a filing, the government said it could ask the court to require Google to make the underlying data that powers its search engine available to competitors.
It said it was considering asking for “structural” changes to Google to stop the company from leveraging the power of its Chrome browser, Android operating system or Play app store to benefit its search business. But it stopped short of identifying what those changes could be.
“Google’s anticompetitive conduct resulted in interlocking and pernicious harms that present unprecedented complexities in a highly evolving set of markets,” the government said in its filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “These markets are indispensable to the lives of all Americans, whether as individuals or as business owners, and the importance of effectively unfettering these markets and restoring competition cannot be overstated.”
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a blog post in response to the filing that the company was concerned the Justice Department was “already signaling requests that go far beyond the specific legal issues in this case.”
In a landmark ruling in August, a judge on that court, Amit P. Mehta, said Google “is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” It crossed a line when it paid companies like Apple and Samsung billions of dollars to be the automatic search engine in web browsers and on smartphones, Judge Mehta ruled in the case, U.S. et al. v. Google.
The Justice Department’s request is the first formal step in a monthslong process that could reshape a company that is synonymous with the act of looking for answers online. Any limits on Google’s search business could help redefine online competition with rivals including Microsoft and OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
Beyond asking Google to release some of the data distinguishing its secret sauce for search results, the most extreme option would require Google to spin off parts of its search business completely. That would add it to a small list of companies, including AT&T and Standard Oil, that split apart after a bruising battle with the U.S. government.
Judge Mehta’s decision on how to address the concerns about Google’s monopolistic behavior, expected next year, will provide a signal of the strength of government efforts to rein in tech giants that influence how we shop, consume information and communicate online.
Federal antitrust officials have sued Apple, Amazon and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram. They have also sued Google a second time over its ad tech business, which a federal judge is expected to rule on as soon as this year. And already, federal trustbusters are turning their sights to another group of companies specializing in artificial intelligence, opening investigations of Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia.
(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)
In November, the Justice Department will provide its final request for how to fix Google’s monopoly through what are known as remedies. In December, Google will have the opportunity to propose its own potential fix to Judge Mehta. The company is also planning to appeal his ruling that it illegally maintained a search monopoly.
The case has been winding through court for years. The Justice Department under the Trump administration, along with several states, sued Google over its search business in 2020 over claims that the internet giant muscled competitors out of the search market, including by paying other companies to make its technology the default option for their users.
The government argued during a 10-week trial last year that those placements sent more search queries to Google than to its competitors. Google was able to use that data to widen the gap between its product and rivals like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo, the government said.
Google contended that it faced plenty of competition in search, including from social media apps like TikTok and Instagram, shopping sites like Amazon and artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT.
Judge Mehta sided with the government, saying Google had fomented a cycle of dominance that it was impossible for even well-capitalized competitors to break.
In Tuesday’s filing, the Justice Department laid out many ways it could ask the court to break that cycle. In addition to floating the idea of forcing Google to share its data, the government said it could ask the court to stop the company from entering into deals to be the automatic search engine on smartphones and web browsers.
The government signaled that it had been closely watching developments in artificial intelligence, which companies like Google have rushed to integrate into their search products.
“Google’s ability to leverage its monopoly power to feed artificial intelligence features is an emerging barrier to competition and risks further entrenching Google’s dominance,” the government said.
It said it could ask the court to give websites the opportunity to opt out of having their content used to train Google’s A.I. models. The government also signaled that it could ask the court to stop Google from “using contracts or other practices to undermine rivals’ access to web content.”
The government will have to avoid asking for too much and alienating Judge Mehta, said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt’s law school who studies antitrust.
“So do you ask for something really big, like a breakup, knowing that that’s tilting at windmills and very unlikely to be granted by the judge?” she asked.
Some outside of the Justice Department want it to take that path. Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor who served in the Biden White House, has argued for the government to ask the judge to make Google spin off its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system.
He said in an interview that the government should urge Judge Mehta to consider aggressive antitrust remedies from decades past. That includes the breakup of Standard Oil, the company that generated the Rockefeller family fortune, and a 1956 agreement between the government and AT&T that forced the company to license many of its technological innovations for free, which supporters of antitrust efforts say helped to create the modern semiconductor industry.
“I think they need to convince the judge to look at the broader sweep of antitrust history,” Mr. Wu said.
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