November 22, 2024, 7:36 AM
November 22, 2024, 7:36 AM
The United States Department of Justice asked Google to sell Chrome, the most used browser in the world.
It is one of the measures proposed by said department in a court document presented late Wednesday with the aim of getting the technology giant to abandon its monopoly position in online searches.
Government lawyers also recommended that Judge Amit Mehta force the company to stop signing contracts with companies like Apple and Samsung that aim to make their search engine used by default on phones and browsers.
The document of recommendations with measures that Google would have to carry out was produced following a momentous ruling issued in August by Judge Mehta who concluded that Google had illegally crushed its competition.
A group of states joined the Justice Department’s brief. They argued that the proposed changes will open up a now monopolized market.
“Restoring competition in the markets for general search and text search ads as they are now will require reviving the competitive process that Google has long stifled,” government lawyers wrote to the court.
In its response, Google said the Justice Department “chose to pursue a radical interventionist agenda that will harm Americans and America’s global technological leadership.”
Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, called the Justice Department’s proposal “wildly overstated” and said it “goes miles further than the court’s decision.”
“It will disrupt a range of Google products, even beyond search, that people love and find useful in their daily lives,” Walker said.
Google is expected to respond to the government’s demand for reparations with its own by December 20. The judge’s decision is expected in the summer of 2025.
Searches with the Google engine account for approximately 90% of the world totalaccording to Statcounter, a web traffic analysis firm.
Justice Department representatives indicated that Google’s ownership and control of Chrome, along with its Android operating system, has allowed it to divert users to its search engine.
In another section, the government asks that Google be prevented from returning to the browser market for five years.
Also judicial control of Android is proposed to ensure that the company refrains from using its ecosystem to privilege its own search services and advertising.
Waiting for Trump
The original lawsuit by the Department of Justice against Google was filed in the final months of Donald Trump’s first presidency (2017-2021).
Now that he is preparing to return to the White House on January 20, Doubts have been raised about whether his government will change its strategy in this case.
“It would be strange for them to withdraw a lawsuit that they themselves filed,” said Rebecca Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School.
Even if Trump wanted to stop the process, something Vanderbilt considers unlikely, the states that have come forward could move forward.
The expert believes that “the federal government will continue forward, but how much force they will use or what they will ask for is uncertain.”
According to Laura Phillips-Sawyer of the University of Georgia School of Law, the proposed changes will play an important role in restoring competition in the web search market.
“The user data that Google secured thanks to its search dominance helped it fine-tune its search algorithm and sell ads”explains Phillips-Sawyer.
“But those contracts also made it impossible for any new player to secure a distribution channel, and, without any possibility of reaching consumers, no one is going to invest in innovation.”
The expert believes that if the judge accepts the Department of Justice’s proposals, potential Google competitors would have a chance to prosper.
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