Tech
ANTITRUST CASE: US govt moves to force Google to sell parts of its business
The U.S. Department of Justice is examining the possibility of requesting a federal judge to force Google to sell parts of its business following a ruling that its widely used search engine is an illegal monopoly.
The fresh development per a court document filed by government lawyers, however, is merely one of the numerous potential remedies being examined.
In late-day court filings, government attorneys listed several possible remedies that the government may pursue. These remedies include limiting how Google’s artificial intelligence scrapes other websites to provide search results and preventing Google from paying Apple and other companies billions of dollars every year to guarantee that Google is the search engine that users see by default on devices like iPhones.
In an attempt to challenge Google’s monopolies in search and search advertising, the Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general filed a 32-page (PDF) document on Tuesday outlining possible remedies.
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Behavioral limitations and more harsh structural requirements are among the choices presented in the proposed remedies framework, which was filed to U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled against Google in a historic antitrust lawsuit last August.
The lawsuit on Tuesday is the first in a lengthy legal procedure to find remedies that can completely transform a business that has long been associated with internet search. The process might take months.
“For more than a decade, Google has controlled the most popular distribution channels, leaving rivals with little-to-no incentive to compete for users,” the antitrust enforcers wrote in the filing. “Fully remedying these harms requires not only ending Google’s control of distribution today, but also ensuring Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow.”
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