Report: DOJ Asks Judge to Force Google to Sell Chrome

The U.S. Department of Justice will reportedly ask Judge Amit Mehta to force Google to sell its Chrome web browser to prevent the company from continuing to abuse its illegal Internet Search monopoly. That’s according to a new report in Bloomberg that cites multiple sources.

Google lost its historic U.S. antitrust case in August, with Judge Mehta ruling that Google Search is a monopoly and that its agreements with Apple, Mozilla, and others violate U.S. antitrust laws.

“Google’s distribution agreements are exclusionary contracts that … ensure that half of all [online search] users in the United States receive Google as the preloaded default on all Apple and Android devices, as well as cause additional anticompetitive harm,” he wrote. “The agreements ‘clearly have a significant effect in preserving [Google’s] monopoly’.”

In a hearing a month later, Judge Mehta told the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and 17 U.S. states that prosecuted the case to submit proposals for how Google should be punished for its abuses, and he specifically told them to include more recent AI developments in those proposals. He plans to hold an evidentiary hearing in March or April 2025, and then deliver a final remedy by August 2025. The government considered breaking up Google in the wake of its victory, and while that could take many forms, it considered forcing Google to sell off its advertising business, Android platform, and/or Chrome web browser.

If Bloomberg is correct, it’s settled on the latter option, though it will also ask the judge to impose other limits on Google’s business practices. It will ask the judge to force Google to provide websites with ways to opt out of Ai training, force Google to decouple Android from Search and the Play Store, require it to license its search results and data to third parties, and share more information with advertisers related to where their ads appear.

Google is not amused.

“The DOJ continues to push a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case,” Google vice president Lee-Anne Mulholland told the publication. “The government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers, and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.”