Michael Liedtke, Associated Press:
The proposed breakup floated in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice calls for sweeping punishments that would include a sale of Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and impose restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine.
[…]
Although regulators stopped short of demanding Google sell Android too, they asserted the judge should make it clear the company could still be required to divest its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee continues to see evidence of misconduct.
In addition to requiring that Chrome be divested, the proposal calls for several other major changes that would be enforced over a 10-year period. They include:
Blocking Google from making deals like the one it has with Apple to be its default search engine.
Requiring it to let device manufacturers show users a “choice screen” with multiple search engine options on it.
Licensing data about search queries, results, and what users click on to rivals.
Blocking Google from buying or investing in advertising or search companies, including makers of AI chatbots. (Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion into Anthropic last year.)
The full proposal (PDF) is a pretty easy read. One of the weirder ideas pitched by the Colorado side is to have Google “fund a nationwide advertising and education program” which may, among other things, “include reasonable, short-term incentive payments to users” who pick a non-Google search engine from the choice screen.
I am guessing that is not going to happen, and not just because “Plaintiff United States and its Co-Plaintiff States do not join in proposing these remedies”. In fact, much of this wish list seems unlikely to be part of the final judgement expected next summer — in part because it is extensive, in part because of politics, and also because it seems unrelated.
Deborah Mary Sophia, Akash Sriram, and Kenrick Cai, Reuters:
“DOJ will face substantial headwinds with this remedy,” because Chrome can run search engines other than Google, said Gus Hurwitz, senior fellow and academic director at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. “Courts expect any remedy to have a causal connection to the underlying antitrust concern. Divesting Chrome does absolutely nothing to address this concern.”
I — an effectively random Canadian with no expertise in this and, so, you should take my perspective with appropriate caveats — disagree.
The objective of disentangling Chrome from Google’s ownership, according to the executive summary (PDF) produced by the Department of Justice, is to remove “a significant challenge to effectuate a remedy that aims to ‘unfetter [these] market[s] from anticompetitive conduct'”:
A successful remedy requires that Google: stop third-party payments that exclude rivals by advantaging Google and discouraging procompetitive partnerships that would offer entrants access to efficient and effective distribution; disclose data sufficient to level the scale-based playing field it has illegally slanted, including, at the outset, licensing syndicated search results that provide potential competitors a chance to offer greater innovation and more effective competition; and reduce Google’s ability to control incentives across the broader ecosystem via ownership and control of products and data complementary to search.
The DOJ’s theory of growth reinforcing quality and market dominance is sound, from what I understand, and Google does advantage Chrome in some key ways. Most directly related to this case is whether Chrome activity is connected to Google Search. Despite company executives explicitly denying using Chrome browsing data for ranking, a leak earlier this year confirmed Google does, indeed, consider Chrome views in its rankings.
There is also a setting labelled “Make searches and browsing better”, which automatically “sends URLs of the pages you visit” to Google for users of Chromium-based browsers. Google says this allows the company to “predict what sites you might visit next and to show you additional info about the page you’re visiting” which allows users to “browse faster because content is proactively loaded”.
There is a good question as to how much Google Search would be impacted if Google could not own Chrome or operate its own browser for five years, as the remedy proposes. How much weight these features have in Google’s ranking system is something only Google knows. And the DOJ does not propose that Google Search cannot be preloaded in browsers whatsoever. Many users would probably still select Google as their browser’s search engine, too. But Google Search does benefit from Google’s ownership of Chrome itself, so perhaps it is worth putting barriers between the two.
I do not think Chrome can exist as a standalone company. I also do not think it makes sense for another company to own it, since any of those big enough to do so either have their own browsers — Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge — or would have the potential to create new anticompetitive problems, like if it were acquired by Meta.
What if the solution looks more like prohibiting Google from uniquely leveraging Chrome to benefit its other products? I do not know how that could be written in legal terms, but it appears to me this is one of the DOJ’s goals for separating Chrome and Google.