U.S. Regulators Call for Google to Sell Off Chrome Browser
The U.S. Department of Justice is urging a federal judge to break up Google, with regulators calling for the tech giant to sell its Chrome web browser in order to boost competition.
The Wednesday evening filing comes after an industry-shaking ruling in August found Google broke antitrust laws in order to maintain a monopoly on web searches.
“The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired,” DOJ lawyers wrote in a filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”
Beyond selling Chrome, the DOJ called for two other big changes that would reshape Google’s business and the tech landscape in general.
The DOJ wants Judge Amit Mehta — the same judge that sided with the department in August — to prohibit Google from making deals with Apple and Samsung that make it the default search engine on their phones. Google, according to the government, pays Apple $20 billion per year to be the default search engine on iPhones.
Chrome, according to stats provided by SimilarWeb, is the most popular web browser in the U.S., with 54% of Americans using it as their default browser; the next most-used browser is Apple’s Safari, which 33.4% of Americans use first.
“Google’s exclusionary conduct has, among other things, made Google the near universal default for search and ensured that virtually all search access points route users’ valuable queries and interaction data to Google,” the DOJ said in its filing.
The other major change the DOJ is seeking is to bar Google’s search engine from giving “preferential access” to its other businesses, like YouTube.
Google, in a Thursday blog post from Kent Walker, its president of global affairs, said the “wildly overbroad” proposal would stifle its business.
“DOJ had a chance to propose remedies related to the issue in this case: search distribution agreements with Apple, Mozilla, smartphone OEMs, and wireless carriers,” Walker said. “Instead, DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership.”
The DOJ’s proposal would harm Google in several ways, he said, including chilling the company’s investment in artificial intelligence. American consumers would also be hurt, Walker said, because the changes would “undermine the quality of products people love.”
Beyond the measures mentioned above, the DOJ said Google uses its Android phones to favor its own search products in “myriad obvious and not-so-obvious-ways.” To change that, the DOJ said Google could spinoff Android from its core business, or present “behavioral remedies” that would block Google’s ability to “use its control of the Android ecosystem to favor its general search services.”
A hearing on the DOJ’s filing is set for April, and a decision is expected by mid-2025.
The post U.S. Regulators Call for Google to Sell Off Chrome Browser appeared first on TheWrap.
