Google faces off with US government in attempt to break up company in search monopoly case

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE Associated Press Mechanism Writer Google confronts an existential threat Monday as the U S regime tries to break up the company as punishment for turning its revolutionary search engine into a ruthless monopoly The drama will unfold in a Washington courtroom during the next three weeks during hearings that will determine how the company should be penalized for operating an illegal monopoly in search In its opening arguments federal antitrust enforcers also urged the court to impose forward-looking remedies to prevent Google from using the same strategies to build a monopoly around artificial intelligence FILE A woman walks by a giant screen with a logo at an event at the Paris Google Lab on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris Sunday Feb AP Photo Thibault Camus File This is a moment in time we re at an inflection point will we abandon the search territory and surrender them to control of the monopolists or will we let competition prevail and give choice to future generations revealed Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist The U S Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to order a radical shake-up that would ban Google from striking the multibillion dollar deals with Apple and other tech companies that shield its search engine from competition share its repository of valuable user records with rivals and force a sale of its popular Chrome browser The moment of reckoning comes four-and-half-years after the Justice Department filed a landmark lawsuit alleging Google s search engine had been abusing its power as the internet s main gateway to stifle competition and innovation for more than a decade Related Articles Wall Street and the dollar tumble as investors retreat further from the United States The US has a single rare earths mine Chinese export limits are energizing a push for more A US citizen was held for pickup by ICE even after proving he was born in the country The Abrego Garcia episode pulls Democrats into the immigration debate Trump wants to have Deadly US airstrike on Yemeni oil port appears to escalate Trump s campaign against the Houthis This is a time for the court to tell Google and all the other monopolists who are out there listening and they are listening that there are consequences when you break anti-trust laws Dahlquist declared After the matter definitively went to trial in a federal judge last year ruled Google had been making anti-competitive deals to lock in its search engine as the go-to place for digital information on the iPhone personal computers and other widely used devices including those running on its own Android application That landmark ruling by U S District Judge Amit Mehta sets up a high-stakes drama that will determine the penalties for Google s misconduct in a search territory that it has defined since Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in a Silicon Valley garage in Since that austere start Google has expanded far beyond search to become a powerhouse in email digital mapping online video web browsing smartphone program and information centers Seizing upon its domination in the search affair the Justice Department is now setting out to prove that radical attempts must be taken to rein in Google and its corporate parent Alphabet Inc Google s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that no matter what occurs Google reliably wins the Justice Department argued in documents outlining its proposed penalties The American people thus are forced to accept the unbridled demands and shifting ideological preferences of an economic leviathan in return for a search engine the masses may enjoy Although the proposed penalties were originally made under President Joe Biden s term they are still being embraced by the Justice Department under President Donald Trump whose first administration filed the matter against Google Since the change in administrations the Justice Department has also attempted to cast Google s immense power as a threat to freedom too The American dream is about higher values than just cheap goods and free online services the Justice Department wrote in a March filing with Mehta These values include freedom of speech freedom of association freedom to innovate and freedom to compete in a field undistorted by the controlling hand of a monopolist Google is arguing the governing body s proposed changes are unwarranted under a ruling that its search engine popularity among consumers is one of the main reasons it has become so dominant The unprecedented array of proposed remedies would harm consumers and innovation as well as future competition in search and search ads in addition to numerous other adjacent markets Google lawyers mentioned in a filing leading up to hearings They bear little or no relationship to the conduct identified anticompetitive and are contrary to the law Google also is sounding alarms about the proposed requirements to share online search content with rivals and the proposed sale of Chrome posing privacy and precaution risks The breadth and depth of the proposed remedies risks doing critical damage to a complex ecosystem Selected of the proposed remedies would imperil browser developers and jeopardize the digital prevention of millions of consumers The showdown over Google s fate marks the climax of the biggest antitrust situation in the U S since the Justice Department sued Microsoft in the late s for leveraging its Windows program for personal computers to crush probable rivals The Microsoft battle culminated in a federal judge declaring the company an illegal monopoly and ordering a partial breakup a remedy that was eventually overturned by an appeals court Google intends to file an appeal of Mehta s ruling from last year that branded its search engine as an illegal monopoly but can t do so until the remedy hearings are completed After closing arguments are presented in late May Mehta intends to make his decision on the remedies before Labor Day The search development marked the first in a succession of antitrust cases that have been brought against a litany of tech giants that include Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms which is now fighting claims of running an illegal monopoly in social media in another Washington D C trial Other antitrust cases have been brought against both Apple and Amazon too The Justice Department also targeted Google s digital advertising setup in a separate antitrust incident that resulted last week in another federal judge s decision that identified the company was abusing its power in that field too That ruling means Google will be heading into another remedy hearing that could once again raise the specter of a breakup later this year or early next year