The Justice Department confirms it wants Google to sell Chrome

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) released a 23-page document seeking divestment from Google, including sales of the Chrome web browser and restrictions on Android, confirming previous reports. Selling Chrome “will permanently end Google’s control of this important area of ​​search and allow competing search engines to gain access to the browser that is the gateway to the Internet for many users,” DoJ lawyers said in the filing.

The regulator said Google should also stop favoring its search engine on Android. If the company fails to do so, lawyers argue that it should and should abandon its mobile device app. They also suggested that Google aggregate search results separately and sell its click and query data to help rival search engines and AI startups.

In response to its key blog, Google said the DoJ’s “strange proposal” would harm consumers and affect US technology leadership. “[The] “The DoJ has chosen to push an aggressive interventionist agenda that will harm the American people and America’s global leadership,” wrote Global Affairs president and chief legal officer Kent Walker. It will disrupt a wide range of Google products — even beyond Search — that people love and find useful. in their daily lives.”

This all started back in 2020, when the DoJ and several states filed a lawsuit claiming that Google paid billions to device manufacturers to protect the default status of its search engine. Then in August this year, federal judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google was a “monopolist” in the industry and used its power to charge “excessively high prices for search text ads.” (As of last year, Google controlled nearly 90 percent of the search engine market, processing nearly 9 billion searches per day.)

The DoJ’s proposals to separate Google are based on that decision, but the department’s structure and philosophy are likely to change significantly under the Trump administration. Indeed, Google’s keyword blog appears to be aimed directly at the incoming president, poses security risks, requires disclosure to third parties and the approval of “small government.” Recently, Trump himself has weighed in on the issue, suggesting that the rift could get worse. “What you can do without disbanding it is to make sure that there is justice,” he said last month.

All of this is still in the early stages, as there are many court cases and appeals. Still, it would represent a seismic shift in the way Google, a company with 182,500 employees, does business. More importantly, it could significantly affect the way the Internet works, as more than 60 percent of web interactions begin with a search query – and most of those are done using Google searches.