NEW YORK: Technology giant Google might lose its search monopoly as the United States government has said that it might ask a judge to force Alphabet’s company to divest parts of its business which, as contended by the Washington, are used to maintain an illegal monopoly in online search.
The development comes against the backdrop of a US judge’s findings in August which said that the company had built an illegal monopoly owing to the fact that it processes 90% of internet searches in the country.
The solutions put forward by the Justice Department have the potential to reshape how Americans find information on the internet while shrinking Google’s revenues and giving its competitors more room to grow.
“Fully remedying these harms requires not only ending Google’s control of distribution today, but also ensuring Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow,” said the Justice Department.
The proposed fixes will also aim to keep Google’s past dominance from extending to the burgeoning business of artificial intelligence, said the prosecutors.
The Justice Department might also ask the court to end Google’s payments to have its search engine pre-installed or set as the default on new devices.
Google has made annual payments – $26.3 billion in 2021 — to companies including Apple and other device manufacturers to ensure that its search engine remained the default on smartphones and browsers, keeping its market share strong.
Google, which plans to appeal, said in a corporate blog post that the proposals were “radical” and said they “go far beyond the specific legal issues in this case.”
Google maintains that its search engine has won users with its quality, adding that it faces robust competition from Amazon and other sites, and that users can choose other search engines as their default.
The world’s fourth-largest company with a market capitalisation of over $2 trillion, Alphabet is under mounting legal pressure from competitors and antitrust authorities.
A US judge on Monday ruled in a separate case that Google must open up its lucrative app store, Play, to greater competition, including making Android apps available from rival sources.
Google is also fighting a Justice Department case that seeks the breakup of its web advertising business.
As part of its efforts to prevent Google’s dominance from extending into AI, the Justice Department said it may seek to make available to rivals the indexes, data and models it uses for Google search and AI-assisted search features.
Other orders prosecutors may seek include restricting Google from entering agreements that limit other AI competitors’ access to web content and letting websites opt out of Google using their content to train AI models.
