U.S. U.S. Considers breaking up Google to address search Monopoly
Now, discussions have begun about how to fix these violations. Now discussions over how to fix those violations have begun.
Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. Two of the individuals said that they are considering various proposals. One is to break up parts of Google such as the Chrome browser and Android According to the people, the government is currently meeting with companies and experts in order to discuss proposals that would limit Google’s power. Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia asked the Justice Department to He has set up a hearing for Sept. 6, to discuss the next steps. Apple, Amazon, and Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram) are also facing antitrust cases. Google will be taking another antitrust case to trial next month, this time over ad tech. Any remedies in Google’s search case are likely to reverberate and influence that broader landscape.
The stakes are acutely high for Google, which became a $2 trillion internet juggernaut by building an online advertising business and others on top of its search engine. Judge Mehta may reshape Google’s core business or force it to change long-standing practices that helped Google’s search engine and other businesses generated $175 billion of revenue last year. At this point, no decisions have been taken. The company has vowed to appeal the decision. Bloomberg News earlier reported the details of the discussions.
Remedies in antitrust cases can have profound effects. In 2000, in a case involving antitrust, a federal court ruled against Microsoft and ordered that the company be divided On appeal, the breakup was reversed but important legal findings were maintained. He agreed with the government that Google had built a cycle of dominance that prevented rivals from building new innovations and allowed it to He broadly agreed with the government that Google had built a cycle of dominance that stopped rivals from building new innovations and allowed it to raise ad prices beyond what would be possible in a free market.
At the center of that cycle were billions of dollars in payments that Google made to companies like Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine on devices like the iPhone and browsers like Firefox, Judge Mehta said.
Since then, the Justice Department and state attorneys general have started weighing their desire to check Google’s influence with what they can reasonably ask Judge Mehta to do given the substance of his ruling, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.
Google’s competitors and other critics have proposed — either publicly or in discussions with the government — several options for how Judge Mehta should rein in the company.
The most extreme is for Google to split off a substantial part of its business. Judge Mehta said that both products use Google as the automatic search engine, which helps fuel the company’s dominance. Both of those products use Google as the automatic search engine, which helps fuel the company’s dominance, Judge Mehta said.
The government is also considering asking for Google to have to divest a tool that runs text ads in search, the two people with knowledge of the deliberations said.
Last week, DuckDuckGo, a small search engine company that has said it was harmed by Google’s online search dominance, publicly proposed several remedies to even the playing field.
The company said that the government should ban the agreements that made Google’s search engine the default option on devices, give others access to Google’s search and ads knowledge, present screens that allow people to change search engines easily and educate the public about the process of picking a new search engine.
DuckDuckGo, which pitches itself as being more respectful of user privacy than Google, said the changes should be made under the supervision of an independent body with technical experts, to ensure compliance.
“There is no silver bullet,” DuckDuckGo said in a statement. “Truly fixing the entrenched competitive imbalance that Google’s default advantage has afforded them will require a mixture of interventions.”
