US said to consider a breakup of Google to address search monopoly

Washington: Google was found last week to have violated antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly in internet search. Now discussions over how to fix those violations have begun.

Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said.

Other scenarios under consideration include forcing Google to make its data available to rivals, or mandating that it abandon deals that made its search engine the default option on devices like the iPhone, said the people, who declined to be identified because the process is confidential. The government is meeting with other companies and experts to discuss their proposals for limiting Google's power, the people said.

The deliberations are in their early stages. Judge Amit P. Mehta of US District Court for the District of Columbia has asked the Justice Department and Google to come up with a process for determining a fix in the case by September 4. He has scheduled a hearing on September 6 to discuss next steps.

Last week's ruling that Google was a monopolist was a landmark antitrust decision, raising serious questions about the power of tech giants in the modern internet era. Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, also face antitrust cases. Google is scheduled to go to trial in another antitrust case -- this one over ad technology -- next month. Any remedies in Google's search case are likely to reverberate and influence that broader landscape.

The stakes are acutely high for Google, which became a $2 trillion internet juggernaut by building an online advertising business and others on top of its search engine. Mehta could reshape the core of the company's business or order it to abandon longtime practices that have helped to cement its dominance. Google generated $175 billion in revenue from its search engine and related businesses last year.

"The Justice Department is evaluating the court's decision," a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement. "No decisions have been made at this time."

A Google spokesperson declined to comment. The company has pledged to appeal the ruling. Bloomberg News earlier reported the details of the discussions.

Remedies in antitrust cases can have profound effects. In 2000, a federal judge ruled against Microsoft in an antitrust case and ordered the company be split up. A breakup was reversed on appeal, but key legal findings were upheld. Afterward, Microsoft did not exert its dominance over the emerging internet industry, creating room for young companies -- like Google -- to thrive.

In the Google case, Mehta ruled on August 5 that the Silicon Valley company had illegally maintained a monopoly over general online search services and some of the ads that run in search results. He broadly agreed with the government that Google had built a cycle of dominance that stopped rivals from building new innovations and allowed it to raise ad prices beyond what would be possible in a free market.

At the center of that cycle were billions of dollars in payments that Google made to companies like Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine on devices like the iPhone and browsers like Firefox, Mehta said.

Since then, the Justice Department and state attorneys general have started weighing their desire to check Google's influence with what they can reasonably ask Mehta to do given the substance of his ruling, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.

Google's competitors and other critics have proposed -- either publicly or in discussions with the government -- several options for how Mehta should rein in the company.

The most extreme is for Google to split off a substantial part of its business. That could mean the company would have to spin off Chrome, its web browser, or Android, its software for smartphones. Both of those products use Google as the automatic search engine, which helps fuel the company's dominance, Mehta said.

The government is also considering asking for Google to have to divest a tool that runs text ads in search, the two people with knowledge of the deliberations said.

Last week, DuckDuckGo, a small search engine company that has said it was harmed by Google's online search dominance, publicly proposed several remedies to even the playing field.

The company said that the government should ban the agreements that made Google's search engine the default option on devices, give others access to Google's search and ads knowledge, present screens that allow people to change search engines easily and educate the public about the process of picking a new search engine.

DuckDuckGo, which pitches itself as being more respectful of user privacy than Google, said the changes should be made under the supervision of an independent body with technical experts, to ensure compliance.

"There is no silver bullet," DuckDuckGo said in a statement. "Truly fixing the entrenched competitive imbalance that Google's default advantage has afforded them will require a mixture of interventions."