By Lauren Feiner , a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering

Breaking down the DOJ’s plan to end Google’s search monopoly

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-30 06:00:04

By Lauren Feiner , a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.

Next year, a court might tell Google to do anything from syndicating its search results to selling the Chrome browser. These remedies and more were included in a request last week from the Justice Department, which is aiming to break up Google’s search monopoly.

The DOJ’s proposals clued in the public to what the government really wants out of Google. Though the complaint was filed in 2020, the first phase of the trial focused only on whether Google was liable for the antitrust harms the government alleged. After Judge Amit Mehta ruled this summer that Google is an illegal monopolist in general search services and search text advertising, the government has finally laid out its plan for how to restore competition, with proposals ranging from relatively simple tweaks in business practices to large structural changes.

The remedies the DOJ is seeking “would imperil Google’s ability to compete in its core business of search and search advertising,” says David Halliday, teaching associate professor of strategic management and public policy at George Washington School of Business. Judge Mehta accepting these remedies wouldn’t be “quite as big a deal as breaking up Standard Oil, but this would be a bigger deal, I think, than breaking up AT&T.”