US Department of Justice wants Alphabet to sell Chrome browser

Following on from winning its antitrust case against Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) is now seeking to force the search engine giant to offload its Chrome browser.

The landmark US court ruling from August 2024 declared that Alphabet had illegally sought to maintain its hold on the online search market.

Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Alphabet’s strategy of paying billions to ensure the Google search engine was the default search available on Samsung and Apple smartphone devices was anti-competitive.

The DoJ has been looking to curb Alphabet’s strategy to preload Android devices with Google products, and suggested the use of “behavioural and structural remedies” to prevent Google from using products such as its Chrome internet browser, Play app store and Android operating system to “advantage” Google Search.

Bloomberg has now reported that the DoJ is looking to ask the judge to force Alphabet to sell the Google search engine as remediation.

In response, Kent Walker, president of global affairs and chief legal officer at Google and Alphabet, posted a blog describing the DoJ’s proposals as “staggering”, “interventionist” and micromanagement of Google search.

“The DoJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership,” he said. “DoJ’s wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Court’s decision. It would break a range of Google products – even beyond Search – that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives.”

Walker spoke about how the remedy would “endanger the security and privacy of millions of Americans, undermine the quality of products, and disclose personal search queries to unknown foreign and domestic companies”.

He claimed the remedy would damage Mozilla’s Firefox business, as it “depends on charging Google for Search placement”.

Walker also warned that Alphabet would “chill our investment in artificial intelligence [AI], perhaps the most important innovation of our time, where Google plays a leading role”.

In October, the tech giant began ramping up efforts to link government intervention with the development of AI. “There are enormous risks to the government putting its thumb on the scale of this vital industry – skewing investment, distorting incentives, hobbling emerging business models – all at precisely the moment that we need to encourage investment, new business models and American technological leadership,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice-president of regulatory affairs, in a blog post.

The ruling follows on from the Court of Justice of the European Union upholding a fine of €2.4bn imposed on Google for abuse of its dominant position in shopping comparison services.

Among the big questions that will ultimately determine Google’s fate is who president-elect Donald Trump hires to lead the department when he takes office in January 2025.

Commenting after the results of Trump’s win in the US presidential election, Daniel Castro, vice-president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank for science and technology policy, said the new administration should focus on creating a pro-innovation regulatory environment that supports AI adoption, collaborating with Congress to pass a light-touch regulatory framework for consumer data protection. He called on the incoming Republican administration to “enact legislation that preempts state efforts to create a patchwork of digital policies that hamper interstate commerce, such as on digital taxation, content regulation and children’s online safety”.