US Department of Justice wants to break up Google over monopoly concerns — and Google Chrome and Android are on the chopping block

Google is as big an antitrust target as it gets

News By John Loeffler published 10 October 2024

The US Department of Justice has released its proposals for breaking up Google’s alleged monopoly, and Google is not happy with the suggestions.

Among the proposed changes offered by the Department of Justice (DOJ), as reported by Ars Technica, is forcing Google to share its search data with rivals, blocking existing distribution agreements with browser developers like Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, and even forcing the spinning off of Google Chrome and Google Android into separate companies.

According to the DOJ, the remedies proposed by the DOJ would prevent Google from thwarting competition in the search industry, a sector that Google has largely controlled to such an extent that ‘to Google’ has become a recognized verb for searching the internet for information, ostensibly using its search engine.

Not to surprise the reader, but Google is aggressively pushing back against the characterization of the DOJ. According to a Google blog post about the DOJ proposal, the company said that “the government seems to be pursuing a sweeping agenda that will impact numerous industries and products, with significant unintended consequences for consumers, businesses, and American competitiveness.

“The DOJ’s outline also comes at a time when competition in how people find information is blooming,” the company added, “with all sorts of new entrants emerging and new technologies like AI transforming the industry.”

Google is the DOJ’s largest antitrust target ever

Antitrust law in the United States has been a contentious issue for many years now, but the new “proposed remedies” to Google’s effective search monopoly aren’t exactly new, and neither is the US government’s antitrust enforcement against Big Tech.

Famously (and ironically), many of the same arguments made against Google were previously made against Microsoft, who bundled its Internet Explorer search engine into its Windows operating system in the 1990s.

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