The Justice Department has laid out potential remedies to stop Google from illegally monopolizing the online search business, and they include a nuclear option: breaking off parts of the tech giant.
It’s an important consideration for the Biden administration, which has made policing tech giants a priority. But pursuing a full-scale split would be legally risky.
The background: In August, the Justice Department won its antitrust lawsuit against Google over search. The presiding judge, Amit Mehta, declared the company “a monopolist” that took anticompetitive steps including paying Apple billions to be the default search engine on web browsers and smartphones.
Among the actions the Justice Department is considering asking for:
Forcing Google to share some of the data that underpins its search results;
Preventing the tech giant from entering into search engine deals like the Apple contract;
Imposing “nondiscrimination” measures on Google products like Android and the Play app store.
But there was a phrase in the filing that caught many eyes: “structural remedies.” In antitrust lingo, that refers to concrete steps to change how a company operates, as opposed to “behavioral” punishments in which the corporation promises not to do something.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn other words: a divestment of a business.
The Justice Department wrote that it was considering ways to stop Google from using some of its products — such as the Chrome web browser, Play app store and the Android operating system — to illegally bolster its dominant search business. Critics of tech giants, including Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and former Biden administration official, have called for a forced spinoff of Chrome or Android.
The Biden administration has talked a tough game on antitrust. It has pursued multiple cases against Google alone — the Justice Department is awaiting a verdict in a lawsuit over the company’s online advertising business — as well as lawsuits against Amazon, Meta and others.
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