A week after a judge ruled that the tech giant illegally monopolized the online search market, the U.S. Justice Department is considering options including breaking up Alphabet’s Google, valued at about $2 trillion, according to reports. The New York Times and Bloomberg News.
Divesting from the Android operating system was one of the solutions most frequently discussed by Justice Department lawyers, according to reports.
Officials were also considering trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, Google’s search advertising program, and a possible divestment of its Chrome web browser, according to reports.
A Justice Department spokesman said it was evaluating the court’s decision and would assess appropriate next steps in accordance with the court’s direction and the applicable legal framework for antitrust remedies.
The spokesman said no decision had been made yet. A Google spokesman declined to comment. Google plans to appeal the ruling. It faces a separate antitrust lawsuit filed by the U.S. Justice Department that is set to go to trial next month.
Other options for the Justice Department include forcing Google to share data with competitors and putting in place measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, the reports said, citing people familiar with the matter.
During the trial, it was revealed that Google paid companies, including Apple, more than $26 billion in 2021 alone to remain the default search option in Safari. Those deals allowed Google to build a monopoly over search and unfairly suppress competition, the judge concluded.
Shortly after the judge issued his ruling, competing search engine DuckDuckGo proposed banning such exclusive deals.
The verdict, issued last week, found that Google violated antitrust law by spending billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly and become the world’s default search engine. The ruling is seen as the first major victory for federal authorities in the fight against the market dominance of big tech companies.
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Federal antitrust regulators have sued Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Apple over the past four years, alleging the companies illegally maintained monopolies.
Microsoft had reached a settlement with the Justice Department in 2004 over allegations that it forced Windows users to use its Internet Explorer web browser.