Google may be forced to sell Chrome browser: antitrust battle

Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, said that the Justice Department "continues to promote a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case" and added that "the government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would hurt consumers, developers, and American technology leadership at exactly the time when it is most needed". For its part, the Justice Department declined to comment on the manager's claims.

A few numbers: the Chrome browser controls about 61% of the market in the United States, according to StatCounter, and is the most widely used browser in the world. This percentage becomes even more robust in the mobile market.

Government lawyers have met with dozens of companies over the past three months while preparing the recommendation. The states are still considering adding some proposals and some details may change, they said.

Antitrust officials backed away from a stricter option that would have forced Google to sell Android, the people said.

The August ruling that Google violated antitrust laws in both the online search and search text ad markets followed a 10-week trial last year. The company said it intends to appeal.

The judge set a two-week hearing in April to determine what changes Google must make to remedy the illegal behaviour and expects to issue a final ruling by August 2025.

The agency and the states decided to recommend that Google be required to licence the results and data of its famous search engine and to give websites more options to prevent their content from being used by Google's artificial intelligence products, the people said.

Antitrust enforcers are ready to propose that Google separate its Android smartphone operating system from its other products, including search and its Google Play mobile app store, which are now bundled together, the people said. They are also ready to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads are displayed.

Justice Department lawyers and state attorneys general included all of these options in an initial filing in October, as well as a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were the focus of the case against Google.

A forced spin-off, should it occur, would also depend on finding an interested buyer. Those who could afford and might want the property, such as Amazon.com Inc, are also facing antitrust scrutiny that could prevent such a mega-deal. "My view is that this is extremely unlikely," Mandeep Singh, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said in an e-mail. But, he added, it could see a buyer like OpenAI, the maker of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. "This would give it both distribution and advertising business to integrate its chatbot subscriptions for consumers."