• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, October 9, 2024

The Department of Justice on Tuesday suggested that Google's monopolization of search engine services and search text ads could warrant an order that would force the company to separate its search services from the Chrome browser and Android operating system.

In a “proposed remedy framework” filed with U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., the Justice Department said it would seek an order that “not only addresses the harms that already exist as a result of Google’s illegal conduct, but also prevents and restrains recurrence of the same offense of illegal monopoly maintenance going forward.”

Prosecutors added that they were “considering behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features -- including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence -- over rivals or new entrants.”

Another proposal floated by the government would require Google to share information with other companies about its search engine -- including “search results, features, and ads, including the underlying ranking signals.”

The filing comes two months after Mehta ruled that Google violated antitrust law by arranging to serve as the default search engine on browsers operated by Apple and Mozilla, as well as on Android devices.

Prosecutors are expected to submit a final request to Mehta in November.

Google blasted the proposal Wednesday, arguing that the government “seems to be pursuing a sweeping agenda that will impact numerous industries and products, with significant unintended consequences for consumers, businesses, and American competitiveness.”

“Splitting off Chrome or Android would break them -- and many other things,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president for regulatory affairs at Google wrote in a blog post.

“Because both Chrome and Android help people access the web and use our products, we offer them (and their underlying code) for free,” she added. “Few companies would have the ability or incentive to keep them open source, or to invest in them at the same level we do. Make no mistake: Breaking them off would change their business models, raise the cost of devices, and undermine Android and Google Play in their robust competition with Apple’s iPhone and App Store.”

Google also says the proposal to force it to share search data would threaten users' privacy and security.

“The search queries you share with Google are often sensitive and personal and are protected by Google's strict security standards; in the hands of a different company without strong security practices, bad actors could access them to identify you and your search history -- as we’ve seen before,” the company wrote, referring to an infamous privacy breach by AOL. (In 2006, an AOL employee posted three months' worth of supposedly anonymized search queries from 650,000 members. Despite the anonymization, some users were identified based on the patterns in their search queries. Most famously, within days of the July 2006 data release, The New York Times identified AOL user Thelma Arnold.)

The Department of Justice said in its filing that it was “mindful of potential user privacy concerns in the context of data sharing,” but added that “genuine privacy concerns must be distinguished from pretextual arguments to maintain market position or deny scale to rivals.”

The government added that it was “considering remedies that would prohibit Google from using or retaining data that cannot be effectively shared with others on the basis of privacy concerns.”