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If successful, Google will experience its first major corporate break-up since its inception in 1996.
Following a landmark judgement that ruled Google as a monopolist, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is pushing for the software giant to divest from its Chrome and Android businesses in order to remedy its illegal monopoly over internet search.
While the DOJ has insisted that Google must divest Chrome, it has proposed two options relating to its ownership of Android; divestment or “behavioural remedies”.
In a court filing yesterday (20 November), the DOJ however noted that its proposed solution to divest from Android might draw “significant objections” from the company and presented the alternative to “blunt” Google’s ability to use the Android ecosystem to favour its search services and adtech monopolies.
The federal department noted that this solution would need oversight from the court and the plaintiffs, but proposed that the court could revert to its solution for a divestiture if its proposed behavioural remedies fail to provide “meaningful relief” to the markets.
Additional measures presented by the DOJ included requiring Google to disclose data that would level the competitive market it “illegally slanted” and stop its third-party payments that exclude rivals and discourage pro-competitive partnerships.
The DOJ noted that new competition can only thrive after thawing the effects of Google’s years’ long anticompetitive practices.
It said that remedying the company’s unlawful monopoly should protect the market from Google’s “exclusionary conduct”, open Google to competition and prevent the company from monopolising the markets it participates in, in the future.
Reports of the justice department’s proposed solutions that may have far-reaching consequences for Google came out days earlier. If successful, the software giant will experience its first major corporate break-up since its inception in 1996.
In the August verdict, US district judge Amit Mehta ruled Google as a monopolist and said that Google secured various contracts to be the default search engine, giving it a major advantage in the market.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the court said in its verdict.
The US complaints against Google were first issued in 2020 by the DOJ after an investigation into Big Tech competition.
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