Breaking down the DOJ’s plan to end Google’s search monopoly

Next year, a court might tell Google to do anything from syndicating its search results to selling the Chrome browser. These remedies and more were included in a request last week from the Justice Department, which is aiming to break up Google’s search monopoly.

The DOJ’s proposals clued in the public to what the government really wants out of Google. Though the complaint was filed in 2020, the first phase of the trial focused only on whether Google was liable for the antitrust harms the government alleged. After Judge Amit Mehta ruled this summer that Google is an illegal monopolist in general search services and search text advertising, the government has finally laid out its plan for how to restore competition, with proposals ranging from relatively simple tweaks in business practices to large structural changes.

The remedies the DOJ is seeking “would imperil Google’s ability to compete in its core business of search and search advertising,” says David Halliday, teaching associate professor of strategic management and public policy at George Washington School of Business. Judge Mehta accepting these remedies wouldn’t be “quite as big a deal as breaking up Standard Oil, but this would be a bigger deal, I think, than breaking up AT&T.” 

If Mehta accepts only some of these proposals after a two-week trial in April, Google might be in better shape. But it could still see billions of dollars shaved off its empire. And according to experts watching the case, attention-grabbing options like a Chrome sale may not be the biggest threat to Google’s power.

The DOJ says that Google should be forced to sell Chrome because, as the largest browser by market share, it serves as a critical access point for search. It’s installed by default on Android phones and captures around 60 percent of the US browser market.

The goal here is to keep Google from owning a crucial gatekeeping platform that it can use to funnel users to its own search engine and steer them away from others. In practice, the proposal raises a lot of questions about how a sale would impact the web.

There are several options for potential buyers: Rumble, the anti-“cancel culture” video platform, has already declared its interest. Bloomberg Intelligence senior tech analyst Mandeep Singh says most other big tech companies that might want it, like Amazon and Meta, would likely be blocked as potential antitrust threats. Apple might be an exception, Singh says, if the government wants to incentivize it developing a rival search engine — something Google highly discouraged with a lucrative revenue-sharing deal. (That said, Apple already owns a major browser, which would consolidate the tech market in a different way.) Depending on who buys Chrome, the court could also approve conditions that constrain how a buyer leverages it. 

Outside the standard big tech players, Chrome could also be valuable to large language model companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, where it could provide a distribution channel for their AI chatbots. “Chrome as an independent entity doesn’t generate any revenue,” Singh notes — its value lies in having a huge audience to monetize. So plugging it into another search-based product, especially if the DOJ wins other remedies like data-sharing rules, is a likely prospect.

Will this actually create a better, more competitive environment for search engines? Or will it just give another company (perhaps even a massive one like Microsoft, which works closely with OpenAI) its own anti-competitive advantage? “There is definitely an issue about whether you’re just simply transferring a valuable asset from one company where these assets are too tightly integrated, to another company,” says Shubha Ghosh, director of the Intellectual Property Law Institute at Syracuse University. DuckDuckGo SVP of public affairs Kamyl Bazbaz says the judge and DOJ “should be thoughtful about how to make sure that a sale doesn’t result in creating another space that’s hard to compete for all search engines.”

But even if a company like OpenAI can tie a browser with its search product, Singh says it wouldn’t necessarily have the same impact on the market. “When you think about the time spent on the internet as an aggregate, Google still has the most time spent,” thanks to everything from YouTube to Gmail, says Singh. That makes it a unique powerhouse for advertising — which is, fundamentally, how search engines (and likely, eventually, some AI services) make money. “You can’t replicate engagement.”

The DOJ says Google would also need to spin out its open-source browser project Chromium — which helps power the Brave, Opera, and Microsoft Edge browsers — as part of the Chrome sale. The nonpartisan Consumer Choice Center has expressed concern over this outcome, saying it could put the project “in jeopardy.” Singh seems less concerned, saying the open-source project may “take its own course,” but that’s still a significant risk for browser makers that rely on it.

Depending on what restrictions a buyer faces, Chrome could offer a huge distribution channel for whatever other products they offer. For consumers, the browser experience will likely depend on who ends up buying it — a company that already has a savvy browser-building team like Apple or a company or group without that specialized experience, like a private equity firm. 

Selling off Chrome won’t necessarily mean its users stop going to google.com, whose name has been synonymous with “search engine” for decades. “I think Google Search will still be the most visited page,” says Singh. “But it’s just the ad business. When you think about why the ads shown on Google are so effective, Chrome is a big part of that.”

The Chrome sale is part of a larger project: stopping Google from using all its many tools and platforms to unfairly promote each other. The government says Google should be barred in particular from preferencing its search engine on other services — that means avoiding things like making Google Search mandatory on Android or degrading the quality of competing products there.

“Google would essentially be forbidden from managing a search engine that did anything other than collect people who went to google.com or set their preferences as google.com,” says Halliday. “It would actually allow all of their competitors much more flexibility than Google.”

The DOJ wants the judge to prohibit Google from doing things like giving its own search, search text ads, or AI products “preferential access to Android or Google-owned apps or data” relative to competitors. That means Google couldn’t do things like make its Gemini AI product mandatory on Android devices or degrade the quality of rival products on Android.

The demand that Google sell Chrome might be the DOJ’s most eye-catching proposal, but another section could be an even bigger deal. The government wants Google to syndicate the very data its search engine is built upon — disrupting a self-reinforcing cycle that helps Google stay on top. 

The DOJ says that as Google gobbled up access points to search engines, its huge volume of search queries gave it another advantage. It’s got more information than any competitor about which search results people find useful, and the government argues that makes it impossible for anyone to catch up. The result is that Google faces little competitive pressure to keep making its service better — which, even if it’s got the best search engine in the business, may end up making users’ experience worse. (If you don’t like AI summaries injected on top of your search results, for instance, do you want the engine using them to be the only game in town?)

The government’s proposal would (in theory) change that. For 10 years, the DOJ wants Google to syndicate its search results, ranking signals, and query data to competitors at a marginal cost. That kind of information could let competing search engines like Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo very quickly improve their products. If that happens, search engines’ competitive edge would likely center more around the additional product features they offer — anything from privacy to user interface details.

Singh called the DOJ’s search results remedy “the strongest” of all the proposals. Google has been able to build up a robust moat through its extensive data collection over the years, Singh says, so “if you make that search index available to everyone, then potentially, you could see more competition in search as a result of that.”

Google will make money from syndicating this data, but Singh says it won’t outweigh losing its huge advantage in search. He predicts it could cut Google’s search revenue by up to 10 percent, comparing the impact to Meta’s $10 billion revenue hit after Apple started requiring stricter privacy settings on iOS.

“If that were to happen, suddenly your LLM search companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Perplexity, these guys will be a formidable competitor in search,” Singh says. “The reason why people go to Google Search is because their search indexes are just the best.”

Ordering so-called behavioral remedies is far more likely than a breakup and still quite threatening to Google’s bottom line, according to Bloomberg Intelligence litigation analysts Matthew Schettenhelm and Jennifer Rie. “A behavioral order is likely to result in loss of the default position and market share,” they write in a recent research note. “The ultimate impacts will depend on the injunction’s scope and subsequent user behavior,” but they predict a possible net loss upwards of $28 billion. While Google plans to appeal the ruling, Schettenhelm and Rie predict that the DC District Court decision will be upheld, calling it “well-reasoned, thorough and based on a straightforward antitrust framework.”

It may sound surprising for the government to make Google license some of its most valuable data, but Ghosh says it’s possible. “Data is not really protected, per se, by intellectual property,” he says. “It’s not like Google created the data. They created the platform that allowed the data to be generated.” It’s like asking who owns a news event, he adds. “The news is just what happens, and you just have an agency that collects it or observes it. But that doesn’t by itself create any kind of property right.”

That said, Halliday notes that syndication fees will still almost certainly make Google rich. “By rich, I mean less rich than today,” he says, “but still very, very rich compared to other companies.”

Perhaps the most straightforward request is a ban on Google striking exclusionary contracts for preferred placement of its search products on browsers and phones. Google would be banned from entering revenue-share agreements to distribute its search product or offer anything of value to Apple, Android phone-makers, or browser companies for any kind of default preinstallation or preferred placement. That means an end to things like its multibillion-dollar deal with Apple for prime placement on Safari for macOS and iOS.

This isn’t surprising given how much of the trial focused on that Apple revenue-sharing deal. But ironically, Google may actually benefit from some of these changes. “Even if you prevent these contracts from being done between companies and introduce a bidding mechanism, there may not be any other bidder that is willing to pay $20 billion to Apple,” says Singh. “In that case, if anything, the traffic acquisition costs may go down for Alphabet, and people may still use Google because it has the brand and these habits are hard to change. And so that may actually be a net benefit to Google.”

Halliday says prohibiting Google’s default agreement for Apple is “probably a wash at the end for Google” since it gets to save the money it spent there. But it would likely still impact Google’s revenue by reducing the number of people searching on its service.

The proposed judgment would require choice screens on Chrome and Android for users to select their preferred search engine. This kind of remedy has been tried as an antitrust remedy in Europe, where it’s reportedly had little impact on Google’s market share. But some proponents have pinned the blame on how Google implemented it, something an independent committee could review here. The state plaintiffs led by Colorado are also requesting Google fund a national education program that will inform consumers about the remedies. That could even include “short-term incentive payments to users who voluntarily choose a non-Google default GSE [general search engine] on a Choice Screen.”

While competitors to Google Search and Chrome would certainly benefit from many of the remedies, Mozilla — which runs the Firefox browser and relies massively on payments from Google — warns that the DOJ’s proposal could “unnecessarily impact browser competition.” Mozilla spokesperson Brandon Borrman says in a statement that “as written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.” During the trial, Google pointed out that Firefox actually did switch to Yahoo search at one point — only to come back to Google after users hated it.

But DuckDuckGo’s Bazbaz says the industry could see “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The theory goes that, over time, ad revenue would follow other search engines as they increase in size, helping their revenue-share payments to distribution channels like Mozilla make up for the large payments it would lose from Google. And Apple in particular could have a greater incentive to develop its own search competitor without the exclusive agreement, something the government has frequently emphasized.

Judge Mehta also found Google maintained an illegal monopoly in the search text ads market, charging more than a reasonable competitive price for ads while degrading their quality. To remedy that, the government is proposing that Google give advertisers more transparency and control. Under the proposal, Google would have to give advertisers more insight into their ad performance and costs and give them more options in how their ads are targeted. Google would also have to let advertisers export their search text ad data, making it easier to switch to rivals.

There’s one demand the government notably didn’t make: forcing Google to sell Android. But it says the option should be available should Google fail to comply with other remedies or if these remedies prove less effective than anticipated.

“Google is going to have a lot of incentives to not comply,” says Adam Epstein, president and co-CEO of adMarketplace, a search advertising marketplace. “That really is where the ball game is going to get won or lost for the consumer and the advertisers and the publishers.“ In that case, an Android sell-off is one of the final cards the DOJ could play.

Like Chrome, Google’s Android mobile operating system serves as an important access point for search. Losing Android, Singh says, would “really hit them in the gut,” since it’s where Google gets so much of its mobile distribution. It would put its dominance in search up for grabs in a new way.

“The only silver lining here for Alphabet is the DOJ is talking about a forced sale of Chrome and not Android,” says Singh. “[The] operating system is way, way more important than anything else for a tech company,” he says. “[The] operating system is the core of distribution.”

Even if the DOJ gets everything else it wants, Google isn’t likely to fall out of its position as a big tech company. “As long as they have their crown jewels — like YouTube, and Android, and Google Search — as long as they’re part of one entity, they will always be among the best companies.”