The US Department of Justice wants Google to sell its chrome browser as part of the final remedial proposal in a groundbreaking antitrust case.
The proposal, submitted on Friday afternoon, says that Google must “immediately get rid of Chrome, along with all assets or services necessary to successfully complete the sale, for the buyer approved by the plaintiffs at his own discretion, subject to the conditions that the court and the reasons approve.” It would also require Google to stop paying to partners for preferential treatment of their search engine.
The state also requires Google to provide earlier notification about each recent joint undertaking, cooperation or partnership with any company that competes with Google in searching or in advertising search engines. However, the company no longer has to get rid of the investment of artificial intelligence, which was part of the initial set of recommendations issued by the plaintiff in November last year. The company would still be obliged to notify the future AI investments in advance.
“Thanks to its size and unlimited power, Google robbed consumers and a company with a fundamental promise due to public opinion – their right to choose from competitive services”, a statement accompanying the application claim. “Google’s illegal behavior has created an economic goliath that sits havoc on the market to ensure that – no matter what is happening – Google always wins.”
The Doj, he formally brought his case against Google in 2020, the most essential technical antitrust case from many years of fighting with Microsoft in the 1990s claimed that Google applied antiquity tactics to protect her dominance of searching and concluding contracts that provide a default search engine in web browsers and smartphones. Due to his search, according to the lawsuit, Google can adapt the auction system through which he sells ads and raise prices for advertisers, as well as from it higher revenues.
Google argued that his overwhelming success in searching – has almost 90 percent of the American market share – from a company offering the best search technology. He also says that consumers are able to easily change the default search engine and that Google is in the face of Microsoft and others competition.
The case was held in 2023, and in August 2024, the US District Judge for the Colombia District, Amit Mehta, said that Google maintained an illegal monopoly, both in search of general and general text advertising.
A significant part of the decision focused on Google contracts with device manufacturers and browser partners that apply Google as their default search technology. According to Mehty’s ruling, about 70 percent of the US queries take place via portals where Google is the default search engine. Then Google shares revenues with these partners, paying them billions of dollars, which discourage them from smaller search rivals who cannot compete with these contracts, said Mehta.
In November last year, government lawyers He sent a detailed plan For Meht, which contained a lot of recommendations for the best to relax Google Fortress on the American search market. These recommendations included that Google immediately disposes of Chrome, a popular web browser; Probably the sale of Android; Finish the search partnership with Apple, in which Apple receives billions of dollars a year so that the Safari browser can search Google by default; And give competitors access to Google data, both in the case of search and advertising, “otherwise they would provide Google with a continuous advantage from exclusion.”