The Justice Department and a group of states plan to ask a federal court late Wednesday to force Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, two people with knowledge of the decision said, a move that could fundamentally alter the $2 trillion company’s business and reshape competition on the internet.
The request would follow a landmark ruling in August by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that found Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search. Judge Mehta asked the Justice Department and the states that brought the antitrust case to submit solutions by the end of Wednesday to correct the search monopoly.
Beyond the sale of Chrome, the government is set to ask Judge Mehta to bar Google from entering into paid agreements with Apple and others to be the automatic search engine on smartphones and in browsers, the people said. Google should also be required to share data with rivals, they said.
The proposals would likely be the most significant remedies to be requested in a tech antitrust case since the Justice Department asked to break up Microsoft in 2000. If Judge Mehta adopts the proposals, they will set the tone for a string of other antitrust cases that challenge the dominance of tech behemoths including Apple, Amazon and Meta.
Being forced to sell Chrome would be among the worst possible outcomes for Google. Chrome, which is free to use, is the most popular web browser in the world and part of an elaborate Google ecosystem that keeps people using the company’s products. Google’s search engine is bundled into Chrome.
Google is set to file its own suggestions for fixing the search monopoly by Dec. 20. Both sides can modify their requests before Judge Mehta is expected to hear arguments on the remedies this spring. He is expected to rule by the end of the summer.
“The D.O.J. continues to push a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president for regulatory affairs at Google, said in a statement this week after details of the government’s discussions were reported publicly. “The government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.”
A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment. Bloomberg earlier reported some details of the department’s planned request.
Regulators have in recent years cracked down on the power of the biggest tech companies. The Justice Department has also sued Google over its dominance in advertising technology, and Apple for making it difficult for consumers to leave its tightly knit universe of devices and software. The Federal Trade Commission has separately sued Amazon and Meta, accusing them of anticompetitive behavior and stifling rivals.
It is unclear if these efforts will continue under President-elect Donald J. Trump. Some of the antitrust lawsuits began during Mr. Trump’s first administration.
The government’s victory in the Google search case followed a 10-week trial last year. Justice Department lawyers said Google had locked out rivals by signing deals with Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and others to be the default search engine that appears when users open a smartphone or a new tab in a web browser. In total, Google paid $26.3 billion as part of those deals in 2021, according to evidence presented at the trial.
The government argued that those deals entrenched Google’s power, guaranteeing that its search traffic was robust. The company then used the data it gathered to make its search engine better, which kept customers coming back.
Google argued that its deals had not broken the law. It said users chose Google because it was better than search engines like Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo at finding information.
The states and the Justice Department were still deciding what to ask for right up to the Wednesday deadline to file their request, according to three people familiar with the talks.
On Monday, a federal judge will hear closing arguments in the second major antitrust trial against Google — the one involving advertising technology — in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Nico Grant contributed reporting.