The Justice Department confirmed Tuesday that it is weighing measures up to and including a breakup of Google as remedies for a landmark case in which a court has ruled its famous search engine to be an illegal monopoly.
The disclosure came in a filing made to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday night, as Judge Amit P. Mehta begins considering what changes to order Google to make to restore competition in the online search market.
Mehta’s ruling in August that Google’s search business is an illegal monopoly was hailed as a landmark by antitrust advocates. Google is one of only a handful of major corporations to be taken to court since the 1970s under federal monopoly law.
It is even rarer for a tech company to be broken up in such cases, with judges wary of unintended consequences for innovation. The last such breakup was AT&T in 1982.
While discussion has swirled for months about the possibility of breaking up Google, federal prosecutors were tight-lipped until Tuesday about the remedies the government will seek in the case.
The Justice Department said in its filing that it believes a range of measures may be necessary to correct Google’s monopoly hold over the market.
“Google’s unlawful conduct persisted for over a decade,” the Justice Department wrote. “Unwinding that illegal behavior and achieving the goals of an effective antitrust remedy takes time.”
Prosecutors listed possible fixes including a ban on Google paying electronics makers such as Apple to make Google search the default option on their devices; requirements for Google to share data used by its search engine with rivals; and educational campaigns supported by Google to help consumers better understand their choices for search engines.
Such changes would have significant effects on Google, reducing the ubiquity of its search engine and cutting into some of the company’s lucrative revenue streams. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is the world’s fourth most valuable public company, with a valuation of around $2 trillion, behind Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft.
While federal prosecutors did not zero in on a breakup of the company, they mentioned it among the possible methods to restrain Google from using its various business arms - like its Chrome browser or Play app store - to favor its own search engine. A “structural” remedy, the legal term for a breakup, could also be kept as a backup measure if Google is not compliant with other remedies, prosecutors said.
Mehta has ordered the Justice Department to fully flesh out its proposed final judgment by next month, after which Google would have several months to prepare its defense. The Justice Department said Tuesday that its proposed final judgment will follow its latest outline of remedies, but that it may still add or delete remedies as prosecutors talk with market participants in coming weeks.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google vice president for regulatory affairs, responded in a blog post Tuesday, calling the Justice Department’s outline “radical” and saying it went beyond the legal scope of the court’s decision of a search monopoly.
She said that splitting off Chrome or Android would “break” them, and that hampering Google’s artificial intelligence development risked holding back American innovation.
“This case is about a set of search distribution contracts,” Mulholland wrote. “Rather than focus on that, the government seems to be pursuing a sweeping agenda that will impact numerous industries and products.”
Google has said it will appeal the case.
Google has found itself struggling to defend its empire against mounting monopoly claims. On Monday, the tech behemoth suffered another legal setback in a separate antitrust case over Google’s app store that had been filed by Epic Games. U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco ordered Google to give developers of Android apps more freedom in how customers can download the apps and how they receive payment.
The Justice Department has also filed a second antitrust case against Google’s advertising business, which is underway in a U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. Closing arguments for that case are to take place next month.
The turning tide against Google has emboldened some of the company’s smaller rivals to pursue their own cases. Yelp filed a new antitrust suit against Google in August, with Yelp general counsel Aaron Schur saying the case was “springboarding” off Mehta’s ruling of Google’s illegal monopoly.
Schur called Mehta’s ruling a “watershed moment for antitrust law” and “something we’ve waited for for a long time.”
Google is not the only Big Tech company under scrutiny. Federal prosecutors are also pursuing antitrust cases against Amazon, Apple and Meta.
In the Google search case, an evidentiary hearing is set to begin April 22, and Mehta has said that he intends to make his decision next summer. Mehta has set limits on the number of witnesses that each side can call, in an effort to streamline the proceedings.
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Gerrit De Vynck in San Francisco contributed to this report.