DOJ Tells Judge It’s Time to Break Up Google

U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta held the first day of remedy hearing in U.S. v. Google–the online search case–today and got an earful from the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ told the judge that Google needed to be broken up to prevent further abuses of its illegal monopoly.

“Your honor, we are not here for a Pyrrhic victory,” DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist said during his opening statement. “This is the time for the court to tell Google and all other monopolists who are out there listening, and they are listening, that there are consequences when you break the antitrust laws.”

As Apple feared, Google immediately betrayed its search partners and told the judge that he should instead narrow the coming remedy to focus only on those companies–Apple, Mozilla, and Samsung–it pays to distribute its online search service. Perhaps those deals could be renegotiated annually, Google lawyers suggested, with the partners it pays allowed to choose a different search engine for private browsing.

The DOJ is not interested in any of that. In addition to stripping Google of Chrome, it would bar the firm from paying any company to distribute its online search service entirely. It would require Google to syndicate its search results and advertising feeds to competitors, as well as open up the data collected by search to those competitors. And it wants the judge to leave open the possibility that Google would also have to divest itself of Android if the remedies he initially imposes do not restore competition to this market.

“Chrome is a significant gateway to search,” Mr. Dahlquist said, noting that “billions of dollars” of revenues from search come directly through the dominant browser. “The divestiture of Chrome, when finalized, will give rivals access to a significant number of search queries to help compete with Google.”

Google describes the DOJ’s proposed remedies as “sweeping,” which they are, and deservedly so. One might logically counter that Google’s proposal is laughably lacking and does nothing to address its abuses. As the DOJ reminded Judge Mehta, AI and the future are key to these remedies as well: Google should be prevented from extending its illegal search monopoly into the AI era.

“This court’s remedy should be forward-looking and not ignore what’s on the horizon,” Dahlquist said Monday. “Google is using the same strategy that they did for search and now applying it to Gemini.”