Karina Montoya reflects on the end of the remedies phase of the Department of Justice’s case against Google for monopolizing the online search market. She argues that Google’s warnings against divestiture of its browser, Chrome, fall short and that a breakup will benefit the security of the internet, innovation, and users.
The remedies phase for the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google’s online search monopoly wrapped up on May 30. Last fall, Judge Amit Mehta agreed with the DOJ that Google had monopolized the online search market through anticompetitive practices. Now, his ruling on remedies is expected by August. If he once again sides with the government, the ruling may order a divestiture of Chrome, the world’s most popular browser with more than four billion monthly active users.
Chrome was not at the center of Google’s anticompetitive practices, which namely included payments to Apple and Mozilla to set Google Search as the default search engine on their web browsers, as well as requiring phone manufacturers who use Google’s Android operating system to preinstall Google Search as the default. However, the DOJ argues that a divestiture of Chrome will separate Google’s search engine and browsers and help revamp competition in the online search market.
As expected, Google fiercely opposes this breakup scenario and warned that it would produce all sorts of terrible things, from a loss of user privacy and cybersecurity breaches to damaging the user experience on other Google products.
As we inch closer to a resolution of this case, it’s worth reviewing how the remedies phase has underscored the need to spin off Chrome.
Why the focus on Chrome?
Google has argued that Chrome’s role in its search monopoly is irrelevant. The government’s case focused heavily on Google’s exclusive deals with Apple for distribution of Google Search, as well as tying agreements with phone manufacturers who use Android. However, last year’s trial featured plenty of discussion on how browsers are critical distribution points for search engines. The discussions revealed how Chrome emerged as an essential fulcrum to Google’s search monopoly, both as a barrier to entry in internet search and a source of data scale.
Google did not just require Android phone manufacturers to default to Google Search. It required that their phones preload Chrome as well and prevent users from uninstalling it. At the same time, users can easily delete other browsers.
Android’s market share of smartphone software in the U.S. is 40 percent. Google’s $18 billion annual contracts with Apple set Google Search as the default option on just short of the remaining 60 percent of smartphone software used in the U.S. Behavioral economics research shows that default status is incredibly difficult for competitors to overcome. Google also pays Firefox’s Mozilla for default placement, with payment amounts that have increased over time despite Mozilla’s small browser market share: one percent on mobile and seven percent on desktop. Through these contracts, Google has locked down how users search the internet. These contracts underscore how essential it is for Google to control the browser market if it is to dominate the internet search market.
The cracks in Google’s defense
Google’s arguments to keep Chrome did not address how they could maintain ownership while opening up its browser to competitors, by, for example, not setting its own search engine as the default. Instead, Google’s argument touted how the many interdependencies between Chrome and other Google technologies supposedly make it infeasible to divest Chrome. These include ChromeOS in Chromebooks and Google’s Safe Browsing. As its executives said, “only Google can run Chrome.”
These interdependencies speak less to the technical infeasibility of these products and services to operate independently and more about how Google has sought to interlock its products to prevent interoperability and fortify the necessity of the Google ecosystem. From the multiple antitrust cases Google faces globally, a pattern of exclusionary conduct and interlocking tie-ins among Google’s products has emerged. The corporation’s claims that further integration across its services benefits consumers should be highly suspect at this point.
Google’s search business has existed independent of Chrome, and it can do so again. Google launched Chrome in 2008, a decade after the official launch of Google Search. At first, Chrome was the combination of an open-source web engine—WebKit—built by Apple and used to power its Safari web browser, and Google’s own V8 JavaScript engine. Prior to its launch, Google had also made two acquisitions that helped improve Chrome: mobile browser maker Reqwireless and the browser-based anti-malware company GreenBorder.
It was only several years later that Chrome was spun-off from this dual structure and came fully under Google’s ownership. In 2013, Google would “fork” WebKit (make its own copy) and name it Blink, citing that WebKit partners were “slowing down” progress. The Chromium open-source project that now supports Chrome and other browsers stems from that forking. But even as Google kept Chromium open source, the corporation has shifted away from enabling an open web compatible with other browsers, pushing instead for web standards under a “works best for Chrome” approach.
Least defensible of Google’s claims is that an independent Chrome would jeopardize users’ privacy and security. Chrome is not known as a privacy-friendly browser, which explains the wide array of Chrome extensions seeking to meet that user demand for privacy. Among web browsers, Chrome collects the most personal data through third-party cookies (including Apple’s phones). Google’s ad business, which the court in a separate case also deemed an illegal monopoly, is based on giving unrestricted access to our data to thousands of companies, including in China and Russia.
Chrome has been complicit in Google’s violations of its own data privacy policies. As recent as 2023, Google settled a California-based class action revealing that Chrome’s “incognito mode” was a lie. The settlement forced Google to delete user data from 136 million users, though it got Google off the hook from paying compensation.
Ensuring an orderly divestiture
Judge Mehta raised two key questions during the closing arguments. First, who would qualify to run Chrome, given the company size required to absorb and successfully manage the acquisition? Second, should we care if the new Chrome owner allows Google to remain the default search engine?
The DOJ addressed the first concern by stating that a Chrome spin-off would necessarily come with a transfer of Google teams to the buyer. Indeed, the remedies phase showed Google has the expertise to acquire and sell technologies in transactions that involve massive transfers of personnel. Expert witness on tech mergers and acquisitions David Locala underscored the 2012 sale of Google’s Motorola Home division to Arris Group as an example of a successful deal involving the transfer of hundreds of engineers.
The DOJ also reconfirmed that a potential buyer will be assessed based on criteria that includes business plans to invest in Chromium and protect and share user data. Colorado counsel Jonathan Sallet, who represents the 38 state attorneys general who have joined the DOJ’s lawsuit, added that Microsoft, which operates the second most-popular search engine, Bing, would not be considered as a buyer. If so, this would reduce the possibility of the search market devolving into a duopoly between Google Search and Bing.
For the second question, the DOJ’s position is that an independent Chrome should be free to do business with any search provider. That would open the door for Google Search to remain the default search engine. However, the DOJ confirmed that a new Chrome owner would be barred from taking payments from Google’s search business—a key disincentive for a new Chrome owner to continue favoring Google, the DOJ argues.
In the DOJ’s preferred scenario, Google would no longer own a browser or be the default choice in a divested Chrome. Nevertheless, Google could still threaten to cut off access to its search engine or otherwise hobble interoperability to those browsers that do not favor its search engine by, for example, continuing to set it as the default choice.
To avoid that case, the DOJ has also put forward additional provisions: Google would be banned from “frustrating or interfering with” how browsers choose to do business with Google’s search rivals, including AI-assisted search products. Ideally, this should prevent Google from stopping a new Chrome owner, and other browser providers, from establishing new competitive processes for setting a default search engine. These processes could include defaulting browsers that prioritize privacy, or creating entirely new ways of searching the web that would circumvent search engines entirely, such as through artificial intelligence systems.
Breakups work
The details of the government’s remedy proposal are still under development. This is not unusual. The last breakup of this magnitude occurred in the early 1980s, and required AT&T to work on a detailed divestiture plan for six months. In this case, the DOJ has already announced it will produce a more detailed process if and when structural relief is ordered.
In fact, the AT&T case shows how breakups benefit customers. AT&T not only had a 90 percent monopoly over phone services, but it also owned a phone equipment subsidiary that was itself a monopoly, overcharging consumers to subsidize AT&T landline network operations. The antitrust case demonstrated that a break-up was needed precisely because AT&T’s deeply integrated structure blocked competition. The separation spurred the growth of more diverse technological patents and allowed for the expansion of cellular communications, laying the foundations of wireless connectivity that we still have today.
Google’s CEO says that the DOJ’s proposed remedies will “kill” Google. But in the case of a Chrome spin-off, it will shift what Google can do to compete, not block it from competing in other legal ways. What we need to ensure is that a new Chrome owner has the capacity to maintain and operate Chrome and Chromium as the essential infrastructure that it has become, building a viable model—profit or non-profit—for access to the open web, optimizing user experience for all search engines, AI-enabled or not.
As Supreme Court precedent tells us, when the government seeks equitable relief in antitrust suits, the public interest is served when the outcome effectively pries open competition in a market that has been illegally monopolized. In the case of the online search, we have yet to see what innovations can stem from rooting out Google’s decades of exclusionary conduct.
Author’s Disclosure: The author works for the Open Markets Institute, which receives funding from foundations such as the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Omidyar Network. You can read our disclosure policy here.
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