US wants Google to sell Chrome to break the company’s search monopoly

The United States’ Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed an official motion in Washington’s Federal Court to sell its web browser Chrome in order to break the tech company’s illegal search monopoly.

Back in August, Federal Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google is illegally monopolizing the online search engine market by leaving little to no room for competitors.

To restore competition in the online search market, the Department of Justice is asking the Federal Court in Washington to tell Google it must divest its popular web browser Chrome.

“Google’s ownership and control of Chrome and Android poses a significant challenge to effectuate a remedy that aims to ‘unfetter these markets from anticompetitive conduct’ and ‘ensure that there remain no practices likely to result in monopolization in the future’,” the motion says.

In addition, the Department of Justice mentions the option of divesting Android, in case selling Chrome doesn’t effectively restore the competition on the search engine market.

Furthermore, the DOJ wants Google to stop offering money to third parties to entice them to make Google’s search engine the default search engine. Also, Google should no longer be allowed to advance its own search engine on any platform it owns or operates, such as YouTube.

Finally, the Department of Justice is asking the Federal Court to allow websites to opt out of Google’s AI listings without being penalized in search results.

Kent Walker, Global Affairs & Chief Legal Officer, calls the department’s proposal ‘staggering’.

“DOJ had a chance to propose remedies related to the issue in this case: search distribution agreements with Apple, Mozilla, smartphone OEMs, and wireless carriers. Instead, DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership. DOJ’s wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Court’s decision. It would break a range of Google products -even beyond Search- that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives,” he says in a blog post.

Google announced earlier that it plans to appeal the judge’s ruling. The company has until December 20 to come up with its own solutions for breaking the search engine monopoly.

Another hearing will take place in April 2025. The court’s decision is expected to follow in August 2025.