Washington: The United States on Tuesday asked a judge to force Alphabet Inc.’s Google to sell parts of its business, including the Chrome browser and Android operating system, that it says are used to maintain an illegal monopoly on online search. announced that it is possible. In a landmark case, a judge found in August that Google, which processes 90 percent of U.S. internet searches, had created an illegal monopoly. The Justice Department’s proposed bailout could change the way Americans find information on the internet, while shrinking Google’s revenue and giving competitors room to grow.
“To fully redress these harms, we need to not only end Google’s control of distribution today, but also ensure that Google no longer controls distribution tomorrow,” the Justice Department said. Prosecutors say the amendments are also aimed at ensuring that Google’s past dominance extends to its fast-growing artificial intelligence business.
Stop paying Google: Department of Justice
The Justice Department could also ask a court to stop paying Google to preinstall its search engine or set it as the default on new devices. Google has been paying companies including Apple and other device makers annual payments ($26.3 billion in 2021) to ensure its search engine remains the default on smartphones and browsers and maintains high market share. .
What Google says
Google, which plans to appeal, said in a post on its company blog that the proposal is “radical” and “goes far beyond the specific legal issues in this case.” Google claims its search engine wins users for its quality, adding that it faces stiff competition from Amazon and other sites and users can choose other search engines as their default. .
Alphabet, the world’s fourth-largest company with a market capitalization of more than $2 trillion, is facing increasing legal pressure from competitors and antitrust authorities.
A U.S. judge ruled Monday in a separate case that Google must open up its lucrative Play app store to more competition, including by making Android apps available from rival sources. I put it down. Google is also fighting a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to break up its web advertising business.
Google’s advantage
The Justice Department has said that as part of efforts to prevent Google from extending its dominance over AI, it may seek to provide its competitors with the indexes, data and models used in Google Search and its AI-assisted search capabilities. Ta. Other orders sought by prosecutors include restricting Google from entering into agreements that restrict access to the web content of other AI competitors and restricting Google from allowing websites to use its own content to train AI models. This includes allowing you to opt out of.
Google said AI-related proposals could suffocate the field. Google said: “There are significant risks for governments to scale this important industry, distorting investment, distorting incentives, and discouraging new business models, but at a time when we need to encourage investment.” “It’s there,” he said. The Justice Department is expected to submit a more detailed proposal to the court by November 20th, and Google will have the opportunity to propose its own remedies by December 20th.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling in Washington was a major victory for antitrust enforcement officials, who have filed a series of ambitious lawsuits against Big Tech companies over the past four years.
US action against Meta, Apple and Amazon
The US is also suing Metaplatform META, Amazon.com, and Apple for illegally maintaining monopolies. Some of the ideas in the Justice Department’s proposal to break up Google had previously garnered support from smaller Google competitors, including review site Yelp and rival search engine company DuckDuckGo.
Yelp, which sued Google over search in August, argues that spinoffs of Google’s Chrome browser and AI services should be on the table. Yelp also wants to prohibit Google from prioritizing local business pages in search results.
(Information provided by agency)
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