The US Department of Justice is considering asking a federal judge to force Google to sell parts of its business in order to eliminate it its online search monopoly.
In a late filing on Tuesday, federal prosecutors also said the judge could ask the court for the underlying data Google uses to make its ubiquitous search engine and artificial intelligence products available to competitors.
“For more than a decade, Google has controlled the most popular distribution channels, leaving rivals with little to no incentive to compete for users,” antitrust enforcers wrote in the filing. “Fully repairing this damage requires not only ending Google’s control over today’s distribution, but also ensuring that Google cannot control tomorrow’s distribution.”
To that end, the department said it is considering requesting structural changes to prevent Google from using products such as the Chrome browser, Android operating system, AI products or app store to benefit its search business. Prosecutors also appear to focus on Google’s standard search deals in the filing and said any proposed remedies would aim to limit or ban these deals.
This is what Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president of Regulatory Affairs at Google, said in response to the declaration that in this case the Ministry of Justice ‘already identified requests that go far beyond the specific legal issues’. “Government dominance in a rapidly changing industry could have negative, unintended consequences for American innovation and American consumers.”
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google’s search engine illegally exploited its dominance to stifle competition and stifle innovation. He has outlined a timeline for a trial on the proposed solutions next spring and plans to make a decision by August 2025.
Google has already said it plans to appeal Mehta’s ruling, but the tech giant must wait until it finds a resolution before doing so. The appeals process could take as long as five years, predicts George Hay, a law professor at Cornell University and chief economist at the Justice Department’s antitrust division for most of the 1970s.