nytimes.com U.S. Said to Consider a Breakup of Google to Address Search Monopoly Aug. 13th, 2024 Google was found last week to have violated antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly in internet search. Now discussions over how to fix those violations have begun. Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said. Other scenarios under consideration include forcing Google to make its data available to rivals, or mandating that it abandon deals that made its search engine the default option on devices like the iPhone, said the people, who declined to be identified because the process is confidential. The government is meeting with other companies and experts to discuss their proposals for limiting Google’s power, the people said. The deliberations are in their early stages. Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who is overseeing the case, has asked the Justice Department and Google to come up with a process for determining a fix by Sept. 4. He has scheduled a hearing on Sept. 6 to discuss next steps. Google’s search case are likely to reverberate and influence that broader landscape. The stakes are acutely high for Google, which became a $2 trillion internet juggernaut by building an online advertising business and others on top of its search engine. Judge Mehta could reshape the core of the company’s business or order it to abandon longtime practices that have helped to cement its dominance. Google generated $175 billion in revenue from its search engine and related businesses last year. “The Justice Department is evaluating the court’s decision,” a spokesman for the agency said in a statement. “No decisions have been made at this time.” A Google spokesman declined to comment. The company has pledged to appeal the ruling. Bloomberg News earlier reported the details of the discussions. Remedies in antitrust cases can have profound effects. In 2000, a federal judge ruled against Microsoft in an antitrust case and ordered the company be split up. A breakup was reversed on appeal, but key legal findings were upheld. Afterward, Microsoft did not exert its dominance over the emerging internet industry, creating room for young companies — like Google — to thrive. went to trial last year alongside a second similar lawsuit brought by a different group of state attorneys general. On Aug. 5, Judge Mehta ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly over general online search services and some of the ads that run in search results. He broadly agreed with the government that the company had built a cycle of dominance that stopped rivals from building new innovations and allowed it to raise ad prices beyond what would be possible in a free market. At the center of that cycle were billions of dollars in payments that Google made to companies like Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine on devices like the iPhone and browsers like Firefox, Judge Mehta said. Since then, the Justice Department and state attorneys general have started weighing their desire to check Google’s influence with what they can reasonably ask Judge Mehta to do given the substance of his ruling, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. Google’s competitors and other critics have proposed — either publicly or in discussions with the government — several options for how Judge Mehta should rein in the company. DuckDuckGo, a small search engine company that has said it was harmed by Google’s online search dominance, publicly proposed several remedies to even the playing field. The company said that the government should ban the agreements that made Google’s search engine the default option on devices, give others access to Google’s search and ads knowledge, present screens that allow people to change search engines easily and educate the public about the process of picking a new search engine. DuckDuckGo, which pitches itself as being more respectful of user privacy than Google, said the changes should be made under the supervision of an independent body with technical experts, to ensure compliance.
Typical Government and our legal system, a dollar short and a day late. We tried that on MSFT just when its dominance ("monopolistic" power) was about to be diminished by new technology. It is a sign that new technology is about to destroy Google's dominance in search and browser? My guess is the age of AI has arrived. If you don't believe me, try chatGPT vs Google search vs Gemini. Not even close.
Chat GPT is utterr rubbish. Claude has become vastly superior now in almost every respect except for Anthropic does not have voice capabilities at the moment. There is no age of AI there is only the age of the latest batch of idiots jumping on the buzzword bandwagon and another group of idiots that think that since enough other idiots are saying it then it's legit
its part of my monopoly basket. but a break up is probably good for google itself; it's fat, lazy, and bloated. zero independent thinking
I do appreciate how they try to poach people. A few times over the years I searched for something and a linux-like shell popped up and said "We like the way you think" and asked if I wanted to do a puzzle. https://foobar.withgoogle.com/
It is unfathomable to be relegated to being " employed " again that s*** is the biggest ripoff in history