This may be the beginning of the end for Google’s dominance over the web. Justice Department officials plan to ask a federal judge to force the tech giant to sell off its widely used browser, Chrome, a
new report from Bloomberg claims.
The Justice Department
filed a lawsuit against Google in January of last year, accusing it of having monopolized digital advertising technologies. In August, a federal judge, Amit Mehta, ruled that the search platform had, indeed, broken U.S. antitrust laws and that it
constituted an illegal monopoly. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote at the time. Since then, speculation has abounded about what will become of the ubiquitous tech platform. The DOJ has
mulled different strategies for breaking up the company.
Now, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, may be forced to sell Chrome. The browser, which was launched in 2008 and integrates with Google’s search engine, is used today
by some 3.4 billion people worldwide.
Justice Department officials are also set to recommend that Google “uncouple its Android smartphone operating system from its other products, including search and its Google Play mobile app store, which are now sold as a bundle,” Bloomberg writes.
When reached for comment by Gizmodo, Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs accused the government of continuing “to push a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case.” She also told the outlet that the “government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.”
The government
has accused Google of engaging in “anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct” that involved “neutralizing or eliminating ad tech competitors through acquisitions” and “wielding its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products.” A 10-day trial found that the platform had engaged in a variety of tactics to maintain its dominance, including
paying approximately $26 billion to Apple and other platforms in exchange for keeping its search engine as the de facto digital search platform in their products.
While you might think the incoming Trump administration might complicate these ongoing legal proceedings, that’s probably not going to be the case. Though Biden’s Justice Department has aggressively pursued action against Google, the crackdown on the platform actually began during the first Trump administration. In October 2020, the DOJ and several Republican-majority states
filed antitrust litigation against the company.
gizmodo.com
