The US has officially proposed requiring Google to sell off its Chrome browser business.
The Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general also want to ban business practices that Google has relied on to keep its search engine on as many devices and in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
This proposal follows an August ruling by Judge Amit Metha that Google’s overwhelming share of search traffic—77% on the desktop and 96% on mobile per October data from Statcounter—represents an illegal monopoly.
It would represent one of the most sweeping antitrust remedies since the 1990s Microsoft antitrust case that targeted that company’s attempts to cement its own Internet Explorer browser in the online experience of Windows users.
“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,” says an executive summary of the proposal. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”
The 58-page PDF of that summary and the proposed final judgment, as posted by Thomson Reuters, lists a series of remedies to address the violations that Judge Mehta found in ruling that Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The first item on that list is a ban on Google offering “something of value” to other companies in return for making its search the default or giving it any other preferential treatment. This section specifically calls out Apple; the trial revealed that Google pays Apple $18 billion a year, plus 36% of search-ad revenue generated in that browser, to remain the default search engine in Apple’s Safari browser. But separate clauses would cover Google’s search deal with Mozilla Firefox and any other contract like it.
That section also bans exclusive tie-ins that would make a site’s content only indexable by Google, such as the agreement that Reddit inked in February.
The second order of business is cleaving Chrome from Google. The proposed judgment would compel the company to sell the browser “to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve,” and bar Google from releasing any other browser (presumably based on the open-source Chromium framework used by competitors like Brave and Edge). The document does not mention Google’s Chrome OS.
This section further invites Google to choose its own antitrust adventure with Android: Either it would have to submit to behavioral limits that would add choice screens to pick a browser and search engine (as EU regulations already mandate), or it would agree to divest its mobile operating system as well. The proposed judgment also gives plaintiffs the right to force an Android sale after five years if they find the behavioral remedies inadequate.
A third set of remedies address the lead Google has built in indexing pages—one that search startups such as Neeva have struggled to overcome with indexing efforts that sites themselves sometimes stymie. It would require Google to “provide, at marginal cost,” access to its index to competing search engines, as well as anonymized query, click and search-ads data from its own search that would help rivals fine-tune their efforts. And it would require Google to honor all requests from sites that do not want to see their content indexed by its search or AI efforts.
Related provisions would require Google to license its entire search stack for 10 years to competitors “at no more than the marginal cost” of syndicating it and compel it to provide extensive metadata about search-ads performance to advertisers.
Finally, a five-person Technical Committee would have power to monitor Google’s compliance, including “access to Google’s source code and algorithms,” throughout the 10-year term of the proposed final judgment.
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An ‘Extreme Proposal’
Google denounced the requested remedies in a blog post Thursday that called them an “extreme proposal.” Kent Walker, president of global affairs and chief legal officer, wrote that they would menace “the security and privacy of millions of Americans” by forcing Google to hand off Chrome and possibly Android, force the exposure of search queries to “unknown foreign and domestic companies,” curb the company’s AI ambitions, and leave future Google products subject to “government micromanagement” via that committee.
In the post, Walker pledged to appeal, writing that the company will “file our own proposals next month, and will make our broader case next year” as Mehta considers the proposed remedies.
January will bring a change in presidents that will almost certainly see Trump administration appointees smash the “undo” key on such Biden-administration initiatives as restoring net-neutrality regulations, but it would be a mistake to assume this case will be among them.
It began under the first Trump administration when then-Attorney General Bill Barr filed the case with a bipartisan cast of states in October 2020. It has since drawn the support of every other state AG in the nation except Alabama’s, plus those of D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam.
On the other hand, in October Trump said Google is a threat to China’s power and that he might prefer terms that made Google “more fair” without breaking up the company. Trump’s own choice of attorney general could also affect that. With Thursday bringing news that his first pick, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (R), is withdrawing his bid, that too is up in the air.
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