Judge in U.S. v. Google Will Take One Year to Deliver Punishment

In a hearing Friday, Judge Amit P. Mehta gave prosecutors in U.S. v. Google until the end of the year to submit their proposals for how Google should be punished for illegally maintaining and growing its Internet Search monopoly. This will be followed by an evidentiary hearing in March or April 2025. And then he will then deliver his punishment in August 2025.

“The world has changed since discovery closed two years ago,” Judge Mehta noted. And so he wants the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and 17 U.S. states that prosecuted this successful case to include AI developments in their remedy proposals.

This alarmed Google’s lawyers, given how central AI has become to the company’s business in the last year or two, and they said they would call witnesses from Microsoft and OpenAI during the evidentiary hearing. But the DOJ lawyers agreed AI should be on the table for any remedy, which could include breaking up Google to separate Search from Chrome, Android, and other businesses.

“The trial was, of course, focused on the past, what Google has done for the past decade to monopolize those markets,” DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist said, adding that his team would now collect evidence “on the future,” with an eye towards opening up the new markets that Google would otherwise seek to dominate illegally by leveraging Search.”

Google’s antitrust problems in the United States aren’t limited to its epic defeat in Search. In addition to losing Epic v. Google, which will result in the end of its dominance of mobile app distribution and payment systems on Android, the online giant is facing another federal antitrust trial for its advertising business. A business the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) just ruled was almost certainly illegal.

The DOJ and several U.S. states sued Google in January 2023 for abusing its dominant position in online ads by violating Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. That case goes to trial on Monday in Virginia.