What’s next in the Department of Justice’s search antitrust case against Google? A Chrome sale to crack the monopoly.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its [search] monopoly,” Judge Amit Mehta wrote in early August in a landmark ruling. The Department of Justice (DOJ) won the antitrust case against Google four years after bringing the case to court. However, the ruling against Google did not say what the search giant will have to do to stop being a monopolist.
We’ve speculated on the kind of Google Search deals that Google will have to stop making, such as the lucrative iPhone deal that’s worth more than $20 billion a year to Apple nowadays. That was just a guess, one that might still prove to be correct.
Two months after the original ruling, the DOJ filed an initial proposal on how to break Google’s monopoly apart and restore competition to online search. The DOJ updated its proposal late on Wednesday, over a month after that initial proposal.
Among the various penalties the DOJ has devised for Google, one stands out immediately. The DOJ wants Google to divest the Chrome web browser, which is easily one of Google’s key weapons for dominating online search. It’s also a very popular browser around the world, which is why the DOJ is going after it.
However, this is just a proposal, and the DOJ will ultimately have to wait for Judge Mehta to issue a final ruling.
Breaking Google apart is one way to reduce its anticompetitive behavior. As The Verge notes, it’s not just Chrome that the DOJ might be targeting. Android is another option, though the DOJ isn’t specifically calling for Google also to divest Android at this time.
