With a triumvirate of web search, advertising, and browser dominance, Google’s online services are absolutely omnipresent — and the United States government is getting ready to do something about it.
According to statements from the Department of Justice, Google may be forced into breaking up and selling off its business assets.
Two months after a federal judge found Google to be in violation of US antitrust law, The Verge reports that DOJ lawyers are still mulling over exactly what should be done about it in terms of regulatory action. But some of the options initially put forward are drastic, including the possibility of forcing Google to sell or otherwise divest itself of the Chrome browser, the Android mobile operating system, or its Google Play default app store.
These steps would be so massive that it’d be the biggest antitrust action in the United States since the breakup of the AT&T/Bell telephone monopoly in the 1980s. Any one of those changes would send shockwaves through the tech world as Google’s Chrome is currently the number one browser in market share by a huge margin and ditto for Android on mobile platforms.
Effectively kicking Google out of these areas would spur enormous worldwide competition, both from its gigantic tech rivals (like Microsoft and Apple) and from smaller players who hope to gain ground and establish themselves in the power vacuum left behind.
One of the immediate actions is that Google will be forced to open up the Play Store and allow users to directly download other app stores from companies like Epic Games, who brought the initial lawsuit.
Nominally, both Chrome and Android are open source, but Google ties both of them in with its proprietary services to help lock them down and boost its own ancillary products, according to the DOJ. Google also spends enormous amounts of money to make sure that its search and advertising platforms remain the most dominant in the world, such as by paying Apple billions of dollars a year to keep Google Search as the default on iOS. That makes Google Search the de facto standard for almost every single smartphone sold outside of China.
It’s hard to overstate how big an impact shaking Google loose from its tightly integrated suite of products would have. But that action is far from certain. Google has already stated its desire to appeal the initial judgment, with a high likelihood of such an appeal reaching the currently conservative and business-friendly US Supreme Court. And the DOJ could opt out of the harshest possible penalties in an effort to make sure they stick and avoid years of legal battles and implementation.
But even with such questions up in the air, Google’s decades of dominance in online search and advertising has never seemed more precarious than it does now.