US Department Of Justice Plans To Argue Google Must Sell/Spin-Off Chrome & Android Due To Monopoly Concerns

In a move that many predicted was going to happen, the United States Department of Justice (i.e., DOJ) has formally stated that it believes that the only way to prevent Google from maintaining monopolistic control in the search, bowser, and online advertising markets, is if Chrome is sold off or spun-off to be completely independent of Google. A district court already ruled three months ago that Google was an illegal monopolist in the markets for online search and online advertising. The DOJ also submitted a request that Google be forced to divest its control of the Android operating system, citing their dominance there as also being an illegal monopoly. The DOJ's position is not guaranteed as the normal course of action for a case like this is for both parties to present paths forward in a "remedy trial." The DOJ is also expected to modify all of its proposals when all parties re-convene in March of 2025, though, the core issue of Google losing its case still stands.

Google has not yet indicated what it believes is an appropriate action for it to take in light of it losing its case but did declare the DOJ's requests as "wildly overboard." In that linked blog, the chief legal officer for Alphabet, Google's parent company, called the DOJ's plan “a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership.” Google's statement went further to say that the remedies requested by the DOJ would "break a range of Google products that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives."

Now, you might be wondering if the new incoming Trump Administration will cause this case to die out or to lose steam. The important thing to note is that this anti-trust suit was first started in 2017 under the Trump administration and given Trump's previous statements decrying tech industry leaders for maintaining systems that he believes echoes a "biased" take on his administration, the DOJ's case is unlikely to be extinguished barring a deal being struck between the Trump administration and Alphabet.

Nonetheless, the prospect of Chrome being forced to split from Google presents an odd situation for consumers. As Ian Bogost of The Atlantic opined in a recent op-ed (paywalled content), the window to brew greater competition in the browser and search world has long passed. Also, even if you found someone willing to buy Chrome or Android from Google, that doesn't address the core issue of both representing approximately 2/3rds of their respective markets. On the other hand, there's no denying that Google is an illegal monopoly. I mean... come one, now. The ubiquity of Google, Chrome, and Android are undeniable and there's no doubting the simple fact that Google controls fundamental parts of how the internet and worldwide web work with zero transparency. But is what the DOJ is requesting actually the best course of action? That's the question at hand.

Browser market? Maybe. Search market? Absolutely not. It's already come out in this case that Google literally pays their way to having massive search marketshare by doing deals with device makers. They pay Apple to the tune of tens of billions per year to have Google be the default search engine on all Apple devices, so much money that Apple makes more money from that than if they made their own ad-supported search engine. It's important to note that Apple has on multiple occasions considered making a search engine but opted not to because of the Google deal. If Google's deal with Apple is torn up, which depending how this case goes may happen, it's likely that a non-trivial part of their marketshare will disappear, especially if Apple chooses to spin up their own search engine. Default settings are everything when it comes to phones and computers. Google's dominant search marketshare is because of this. Take away them being the default search provider on the large majority of devices and suddenly things may look quite different. As shitty as Bing is, Microsoft has already taken a chunk out of Google's search marketshare simply by having Bing be the default engine on Windows. If Apple did the same with their own engine on iOS and Mac OS, suddenly Google's sitting at a smaller marketshare.

The search space is also primed to have new competition. People hate Google Search now. It's widely regarded as a bad product but people begrudgingly use it because it is still the biggest one. A bunch of smaller competitors have popped up in recent years trying to fix, or at least restore some usefulness, to internet search. If Google is no longer able to choke out all of the competition, somebody else who is providing a better and more useful product (which, given how bad Google's search is these days, isn't exactly a difficult proposition) may have a chance to rise.

Look at Twitter. It seemed untouchable in that area of social media even two years ago. In the mean time, the product has been heavily enshittified and become user hostile (well, more user hostile. It's been bad for a decade but it's orders of magnitude worse now). Once that weakness became apparent, several alternatives popped up and one that is better and more like the Twitter people liked has caught on and now the exodus from actual Twitter has begun to the tune of millions of users per week the last bit. You can only abuse the users of your service so much before they either stop using your service or move to a competitor at the first available opportunity. Google Search is in this same camp. People are increasingly fed up with the internet being useless and the AI tools Google and others are providing to try to fix this are making matters worse rather than helping them. Give them a reason to not use Google and they'll take it.

Simply put, I think Google flew too close to the Sun and have burned themselves. They got too greedy and may lose this case as a result. If they would have maintained their practices of 2010-2015 or so, they probably would be easily winning this case. Under Pichai, who took over in 2015, the company has become much, much more aggressive about marketshare and monetization. The separation of church and state between search/cloud products and ads has broken down during this time, and after that all pretences of them being anything other than an ad company have been ripped away.

What Google and their products look like if they lose this is hard to predict so we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

I hate this argument from monopolistic companies so much. Why do I care how good a Google product is when I'm not making any money out of it?

And it's not even true. Google products are shit and they are only getting worse. The core principle of capitalism is that competition drives innovation and Google is arguing directly against that by saying that competition is bad for consumers because it might give them choices instead of having everything they need from a single provider.

By all means, break every Google product for all I care. Contrary to what Google seems to think, I don't love any of them. It's hard to imagine that any other company, if given a fighting chance, could do worse.

Doubly so when their argument that everything works well together is partly because they spent the last decade making their products incompatible with anything else. They took Chrome, a browser that used to be completely compatible with the various web standards, and made it so that they have a bunch of Chrome-specific APIs and functions that don't work on other browsers. A decade ago, it used to be trivial to develop web apps that worked roughly the same on every browser. Now with Chrome for more complicated applications there's a bunch of edge cases and because it's by far the biggest browser, most app developers put most of their resources towards Chrome compatibility with the result that many apps no longer work well on Firefox, Edge, or any of the other browsers. Google quite literally did the same thing Microsoft did with Internet Explorer back in the day where they got marketshare then deliberately broke compatibility with competition to force people to stay locked to their product. The only difference being back then it was whole websites that didn't work when not using IE and now it's web apps that don't work if you aren't using Chrome.

They're literally pulling all of the same tricks Microsoft did in the 90s and early 00s when they got in trouble for this exact same stuff. They're not even trying to hide that they're doing so. It's gross.