GOOGLE COULD BE FORCED TO SELL CHROME TO BREAK SEARCH MONOPOLY: REPORT

Tue 19 November 2024:

The US Justice Department will ask a judge to force Alphabet Inc.’s Google to sell its Chrome internet browser, according to media reports on Monday.

According to sources speaking to Bloomberg, the DOJ reportedly intends to recommend that Google be ordered to sell off its Chrome browser as a remedy in its significant antitrust lawsuit. In said suit, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found that Google had engaged in anticompetitive practices through its exclusive distribution agreements with other tech companies.

In October, Google, in a statement from Vice President Lee-Anne Mulholland, said: “DOJ’s (Department of Justice’s) radical and sweeping proposals risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers.” 

In a statement in January, the Justice Department said that it along with the attorneys general of the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Virginia filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Google for “monopolizing multiple digital advertising technology product.”

“As alleged in the complaint, over the past 15 years, Google has engaged in a course of anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct that consisted of neutralizing or eliminating ad tech competitors through acquisitions; wielding its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products; and thwarting the ability to use competing products,” the statement said.

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In 2020, the Justice Department filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Google for “monopolizing” search and search advertising, which are different markets from the digital advertising technology markets at issue in the lawsuit filed today.

Such agreements ensured its Google search engine was the default option on the vast majority of desktop and mobile devices in the country. Web analytics service StatCounter states that Google currently enjoys 89 percent of the global search engine market share. This number jumps even further to 93 percent when solely looking at mobile devices.

In previous years, Google has paid Apple up to $200 billion per annum to guarantee that it is the default search engine in the latter’s Safari web browser. Safari is the pre-installed default browser on every Apple iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Such deals are unlikely to be permitted in the future.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his August opinion.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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