US Justice Department considers breaking up Google’s foreign business

A week after a judge ruled that Alphabet Inc’s Google had an illegal monopoly on online searches, the U.S. Justice Department is considering breaking up the roughly $2 trillion tech giant, The New York Times and Bloomberg News reported.

Justice Department lawyers discussed the possibility of selling the Android operating system, which was one of the most frequently mentioned solutions.

Officials are also considering the possibility of forcing Google to sell AdWords, Google’s search advertising program, and the Chrome web browser, the sources said.

A Justice Department spokesman said they are evaluating the court’s ruling and considering next steps based on the court’s guidance and relevant antitrust legal framework.

Google plans to appeal the decision and faces another antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Justice Department next month.

Other options for the Justice Department include forcing Google to share data with competitors and taking steps to prevent Google from gaining an unfair advantage in the artificial intelligence market, experts said.

The lawsuit revealed that Google paid more than $26 billion to companies including Apple in 2021 alone to remain the default search engine in the Safari browser. The judge found that these deals gave Google a monopoly in the search market and unfairly suppressed competition.

Neil Chilson, former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, said talk of breaking up Google was wishful thinking. “Judge Mehta’s fairly traditional antitrust approach does not suggest that slicing is a possible solution. Slicing would not address the core issue that the court finds problematic: an exclusive agreement for the default search engine position,” he said.

Shortly after the judge’s ruling, competitor DuckDuckGo proposed banning these exclusive agreements.

Last week’s ruling confirmed that Google had violated antitrust laws by spending billions of dollars to build an illegal monopoly and become the world’s search engine by default. The decision was seen as the first major victory for federal authorities in the fight against the dominance of big tech companies.

Alden Abbott, former general counsel for the Federal Trade Commission, said that selling off Google’s various businesses would be disastrous but unlikely. “In the 2001 case United States v. Microsoft, the Court of Appeals firmly refused to break up the company, even though the court found that the illegal monopoly did not create beneficial efficiencies. It is unlikely that a breakup of Google will be needed. Fortunately, it is. Google will go down as one of the most economically destructive in the history of U.S. antitrust law.”