Will a judge break up Google?

WASHINGTON — Last summer, a federal judge, Amit Mehta, delivered a landmark ruling that found Google had illegally dominated online search.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” he wrote.

Now, Mehta has to figure out how to fix Google’s monopoly. His decision will be informed by a three-week hearing, which starts Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington, where the government and Google will argue over how to restore competition in online search.

The Justice Department wants Mehta to break up Google by forcing the company to sell its Chrome browser, which could cut off a source of information it uses to improve its internet search. The department also wants to make the Silicon Valley giant hand over some of its most precious data to rivals, which could help their competing products.

In contrast, Google has asked Mehta to only slightly restrict its ability to make deals to give its search engine prime placement on browsers and in smartphones.

The outcome could reshape the $1.86 trillion company, which has become synonymous with how people look for information online. Google faces mounting challenges, including the prospect of a breakup in a second antitrust case after a different federal judge ruled Thursday that it had illegally maintained a monopoly in some ad technology. That puts Google in perhaps its most vulnerable position since Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the business in 1998.

Its fate could shake up Silicon Valley as the biggest companies fight to own an era defined by artificial intelligence. Any restrictions could limit Google’s ability to compete with OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and others as search is increasingly powered by tools that can summarize research and offer humanlike guidance.

“The DOJ’s been very aggressive in what they’ve asked for,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who studies antitrust. “They’ve essentially asked for the moon.”

A breakup of Google would be the most significant action taken by a court against a monopoly since a federal judge tried and failed to split Microsoft in half 25 years ago. It has been even longer since the federal government successfully divided up a company over its dominance. The last time was New Year’s Day 1984, when AT&T cleaved itself into eight companies as part of an antitrust settlement reached with the Justice Department two years earlier.

Mehta’s decision could influence other tech antitrust cases. Since 2020, the Justice Department has twice accused Google of violating antitrust laws and sued Apple for making it difficult for users to ditch their iPhones. Meta is in the second week of an antitrust trial over whether it illegally stifled competition, while Amazon is grappling with a lawsuit that accuses it of squeezing the small merchants that use its site.

“At trial, we will show how DOJ’s unprecedented proposals go miles beyond the court’s decision, and would hurt America’s consumers, economy, and technological leadership,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment.

The Justice Department and a group of states filed the lawsuit over Google’s search business in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term. The case went to trial in 2023 under the Biden administration, which demanded that Google be broken up. Trump’s administration has maintained that aggressive stance and continued to scrutinize the tech giants.

The case, U.S. v. Google, concerns payments that Google made to companies such as Apple, Mozilla and Samsung to be the search engine that appeared automatically in web browsers and on the home screens of smartphones. Google paid those companies $26.3 billion in 2021, the court heard during the trial.

Government lawyers argued at the trial that the deals created a powerful cycle to benefit Google. The prime placement of the company’s search engine meant more people used it to find information, generating data that Google could then use to make its search engine better and further entrenching its dominance, they said.

Mehta largely agreed with the government and ruled in August that Google had violated the law. He is expected to order the remedies in the case by the end of the summer.

Last year, the Justice Department asked Mehta to stop Google from making the multibillion-dollar deals to be the default search engine.

The government’s proposal went further. It argued that forcing Google to sell Chrome could deny the company a valuable source of traffic to its search engine. Any time a Chrome user enters a query directly into the browser’s search bar, it goes to Google. If the company spun off the browser, that prime placement would not be guaranteed.

The Justice Department also said it might want to force Google to spin off Android, the smartphone operating system, if the court’s actions failed to improve competition among search engines.

In addition, the government asked the judge to take steps that would give Google’s competitors a more direct boost. Under the proposal, search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Microsoft’s Bing could take Google’s search results and ads and display them directly to their users. Google would also have to hand over data about what terms people search for and what websites they click, which rivals could use to improve their own systems.

Google has argued that not much needs to change. It told Mehta that it should still be allowed to pay Apple and others for its search engine to get top placement. But it also said browser makers should have the option to call off their deals with Google once a year. Those companies should be able to select different automatic search engines for different features, such as a private browsing mode. Under Google’s proposal, smartphone manufacturers would have more freedom to decide which Google apps to install on their phones.

The hearing is expected to feature testimony from Google CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as executives from Google’s partners, including Apple and Mozilla.

Rivals are watching. Kamyl Bazbaz, senior vice president of public affairs for DuckDuckGo, said it was taking a wait-and-see approach, since Google has promised to appeal Mehta’s ruling.

“There isn’t a single thing to do right now to prepare, besides getting ready to watch the case closely,” Bazbaz said. What is decided, he added, could change “nothing less than how everybody uses the internet.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.