DOJ Reinforces Call to Break Up Google Search Monopoly
The Justice Department reiterated Friday its demand for a court to break up the search giant. This request follows a landmark ruling by Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last year The judge will hear arguments in April on proposed solutions by both the government, and Google. The department’s lawyers on Friday reiterated that demand, which could reshape internet competition.
“Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that — no matter what occurs — Google always wins,” the government said in its Friday filing. “The American people thus are forced to accept the unbridled demands and shifting, ideological preferences of an economic leviathan in return for a search engine the public may enjoy.”
Google, which says it intends to ultimately appeal the judge’s ruling in the case, also filed its own final proposal on Friday, maintaining its position that the company shouldn’t need to change much to address the judge’s concerns.
The Justice Department’s decision to stick with its sweeping proposal to fundamentally alter the $2 trillion company’s business is one of the first signals from the new administration on how it may approach tech regulation. The requests, the most significant remedies proposed in a tech monopoly case since the Justice Department asked to break up Microsoft in 2000, could presage how Mr. Trump’s appointees will handle a string of other antitrust cases that challenge the dominance of tech behemoths.
The Justice Department has also sued Google over its dominance in advertising technology, a case awaiting a ruling, as well as Apple over claims that its tightly knit system of devices and software makes it challenging for consumers to leave. The Federal Trade Commission is set to bring a case against Meta in April, based on allegations that Meta suppressed competition when it purchased Instagram and WhatsApp. The agency has also filed a lawsuit against Amazon, accusing the company of illegally protecting an online retail monopoly. Andrew Ferguson, the new chair of the F.T.C. has expressed concerns about the power of tech giants as gatekeepers to online discourse. Gail Slater, Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said during her Senate confirmation hearing that she was worried someone “can be disappeared from the internet quite easily when there are only two platforms providing news, for example, to the American people.”
The filing on Friday was signed by Omeed A. Assefi, who is leading the antitrust division while Ms. Slater awaits a Senate vote on her nomination.
Tech executives have visited Mar-a-Lago in recent months to court the president’s favor, and have donated millions of dollars to Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Chief executives including Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta sat behind Mr. Trump during his inauguration.
The first major test of the Trump administration’s approach to concerns about Big Tech’s power will be how it proceeds in the Google search case.
During a 10-week trial in 2023, the government said Google locked out rivals by signing deals with Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and others to automatically appear as the search engine when users opened a smartphone or new tab in a web browser. Google paid $26.3billion for these arrangements in 2021 according to evidence presented during the trial. The company should also allow rival search engines to display Google’s results and have access to its data for a decade, the government said in its filing at the time.
The government had also said Google, whose parent company is Alphabet, should be forced to divest its stakes in any artificial intelligence products that could compete with search, a bid to stop the company from dominating the nascent technology.
The Justice Department changed that portion of its request on Friday, saying instead that Google should have to notify federal and state officials before proceeding with investments in A.I.
The government also said Google should have to make changes to the business practices of its Android smartphone operating system, eliminating an option that would have allowed the company to simply sell off Android. If the market did not become more competitive, the court could then order Google to sell Android, according to the new filing.
Google had urged Judge Mehta to take a narrower approach. It asked to continue to be able to pay other companies for prime placement of its search engine in web browsers and smartphones. It said that these agreements should be less restrictive and allow for other search engines to compete with each other for prime placement in phones and browsers. Google submitted a similar proposal to Judge Mehta on Friday. The government’s proposals would “harm America’s consumers, economy and national security,” a Google spokesman, Peter Schottenfels, added in a statement.
Judge Mehta is scheduled next month to preside over an almost two-week hearing to determine remedies in the case, which will feature testimony and arguments from lawyers for both sides.
