DOJ Reveals Its Plan for Breaking Up Google’s Search Monopoly

The Department of Justice has laid out its broad-strokes plan for ending Google’s monopoly over internet search after winning its antitrust case against the company in August. The sweeping changes could end Google’s position as the default search engine on billions of devices and require the company to share key information about its search algorithms with competitors.

The regulators’ proposals, laid out Tuesday in a filing with the D.C. federal court where the antitrust case was heard, are aimed not only at rectifying Google’s past anti-competitive practices but also at preventing it from unfairly dominating emerging technologies, particularly internet searches enabled by generative AI tools.

Any changes to Google’s business model will take time, if they happen at all. The DOJ’s filing indicates the general categories of remedies it might seek but the agency still has significant work to do before it puts forward a detailed plan for the court to rule on. Google, meanwhile, has said it will appeal the court’s decision.

Google described the DOJ’s proposals as “radical” and said “government overreach in a fast-moving industry may have negative unintended consequences for American innovation and America’s consumers.”

The first step necessary to unwind Google’s illegal monopoly, according to the DOJ, will likely be to “limit or end” the company’s use of contracts and unfair revenue-sharing agreements that have enshrined Google as the pre-installed search engine on all Android devices and the Chrome browser. It could potentially also include forcing Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to split off the Android and Chrome divisions of its business.

Google’s search tools are powered by the huge amount of data its web crawlers have indexed and the ranking algorithms that prioritize which results users see first. To level the playing field for competitors, the DOJ said it might try to make the company share the indexes, search results, underlying ranking signals, and models used for Google search, including AI-powered search.

“Google’s ability to leverage its monopoly power to feed artificial intelligence features is an emerging barrier to competition and risks further entrenching Google’s dominance,” the DOJ wrote, adding that potential remedies could include prohibiting the company from signing contracts with web publishers that deny rival search engines access to their sites and forcing Google to allow publishers to opt out of having their content scraped and used to generate AI summaries at the top of search results.

The final category of remedies the DOJ proposed would aim to spread the wealth generated by advertisements attached to internet searches by making it easier for smaller competitors to enter markets without being crushed by Google’s economy of scale and by requiring Google to be more transparent with advertisers in its ad auctions.