The legal problems keep coming for Alphabet, which is back in the courtroom today trying to prevent a breakup of its Google search empire.
Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) fate will be in the hands of federal judge Amit Mehta, who ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized online markets for “general search” and “general search text.”
The Justice Department is now asking Judge Mehta in a “remedies” trial to break up Google by forcing it to sell its Chrome browser and potentially sell its Android operating system.
The DOJ argued that Chrome, under a different owner, would give new rivals an “opportunity to operate a significant gateway to search the internet, free of Google’s monopoly control.”
Assistant US Attorney General Gail Slater, who heads the DOJ’s antitrust division, said Monday before opening statements that “each generation has called for the DOJ to challenge a behemoth that crushed competition. In decades past, it was Standard Oil and AT&T. Today’s behemoth is Google.”
Google argues that the DOJ’s remedies reflect an “interventionist agenda” and would harm American consumers and undermine America’s tech leadership.
“When it comes to antitrust remedies, the U.S. Supreme Court has said that ‘caution is key.’ DOJ’s proposal throws that caution to the wind,” Google executive Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a blog post on Sunday.
The start of the remedies trial comes less than a week after Google was dealt yet another blow in a second antitrust case brought by the US Justice Department that alleged it monopolized two online advertising technology markets.
DOJ wants more than just the divestment of Google’s Chrome browser in the remedies trial.
The government also wants the judge to force the company to ban Google from paying mobile device makers and browser companies for search distribution. It also wants to require that Google share its search query, click, and results data. It left the door open to a possible divestiture of Google’s Android operating system.
The only flexibility offered by President Trump’s prosecutors concerns artificial intelligence. They scaled back a proposal from former President Biden’s DOJ that pushed for Google to sell off its AI bets.
Trump’s prosecutors are instead suggesting a setup where federal authorities could keep tabs on proposed AI investments and keep it from using its AI tools to preference its own products, that it says could further threaten search competition.
