The US Department of Justice has released its proposals to break 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 Technicaforces Google to share its search data with rivals, blocks existing distribution deals with browser developers like Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, and even forces the spin-off of Google Chrome and Google Android into separate companies.
According to the DOJ, the DOJ’s proposed measures would prevent Google from thwarting competition in the search industry, a sector that Google largely controls to the extent that ‘to Google’ has become a recognized verb for searching the Internet for informationostensibly with the help of the search engine.
It will come as no surprise to the reader, but Google is aggressively opposing the DOJ’s characterization. According to one Google blog post About the DOJ proposal, the company said that “the administration appears 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 the way people find information is flourishing,” the company added, “with all kinds of newcomers emerging and new technologies like AI transforming the industry.”
Google is the DOJ’s biggest antitrust target ever
Antitrust law in the United States has been a controversial topic for years, but the new “proposed solutions” to Google’s effective search monopoly aren’t exactly new, and neither is the U.S. government’s antitrust enforcement against Big Tech.
Famously (and ironically) many of the same arguments against Google were previously made against Microsoft, which integrated its Internet Explorer search engine into its Windows operating system in the 1990s.
That When the case was filed in 1998, it marked a turning pointand although it was settled in 2001, it was an era-defining action by the federal government to challenge the actions of one of the largest and perhaps the most important technology companies in the world at that moment.
The case against Google overshadows the case against Microsoft several times over. At the time of the Microsoft settlement in 2001, Microsoft’s annual revenue was just under $23 billion. Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, posted revenues of just under $283 billion in 2023.
The stakes for Google couldn’t be higher, especially as the DOJ wants to divest two of its most important revenue centers, Google Chrome and Google Android, the most popular web browsers and operating system in the world. from 2024.
There is still a lot to conclude in this case as it goes through the penalty phase afterwards Google turned out to have a monopoly on online searchbut whatever the outcome, it will resonate across the wider tech industry for years, if not decades.