DOJ contemplates breaking up Google

The U.S. judge’s ruling that the tech giant has a monopoly in the online search and text advertising markets has prompted the Department of Justice to consider divesting Google’s Android operating system, Chrome web browser, and AdWords ad sales platform.

Even in the absence of the divestitures, the government would probably try to have the “exclusive distribution agreements” that resulted in U.S. Google losing an Aug. ruling by District Judge Amit Mehta.

The government may also take less drastic measures to restore fairness to the market, such as compelling Google to share data with competitors and putting in place safeguards to prevent Google from obtaining an unfair edge in the expanding artificial intelligence space. For websites to appear in search results, Google requires them to grant permission for Google AI products to use their content.

Mandating Google to enhance its compatibility with other search engines or sell or license its data to competitors is an additional alternative. An official Google split would be the largest dismantling since AT&T in the 1980s, but Google intends to appeal the ruling.

An estimated 2.5 billion Android-powered devices are in use globally, Google paid businesses more than $26 billion to have their search engine appear as the default on devices and third-party browsers. Apple received the majority of those funds.

The Justice Department mandated in the 1950s that AT&T grant royalty-free patent licenses to end unfair competition. The historic Microsoft antitrust case was forced to provide free application programming interfaces to level the playing field.

Google has more than 100,000 channel partners worldwide. Rather than the ad networks that were the subject of the antitrust case, the majority of these partners work with Google’s cloud and data analytics offerings.

However, regulatory bodies closely monitor the big technology vendors’ transactions and the impact.

In July, a letter was published by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of the United Kingdom indicating that it could “start an investigation” into an unusual agreement between Microsoft and AI startup Inflection, which led to Microsoft hiring the CEO and co-founder of Inflection.

Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, and Anthropic were required to submit information on their latest partnerships and investments,. Legal actions related to antitrust may still be forthcoming against Apple and Amazon.