The Justice Department said on Monday that the best way to address Google’s monopoly in internet search was to break up the $1.81 trillion company, kicking off a three-week hearing that could reshape the technology giant and alter the power players in Silicon Valley.
Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in August that Google had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in online search. He is now hearing arguments from the government and the company over how to best fix Google’s monopoly and is expected to order those measures, referred to as “remedies,” by the end of the summer.
In an opening statement in the hearing on Monday, the government said Judge Mehta should force Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser, which drives users to its search engine. Government lawyers also said the company should take steps to give competitors a leg up if the court wants to restore competition to the moribund market for online search.
“Your Honor, we are not here for a Pyrrhic victory,” David Dahlquist, a Justice Department lawyer, said in his opening statement. “This is the time for the court to tell Google and all other monopolists who are out there listening, and they are listening, that there are consequences when you break the antitrust laws.”
Google’s lawyers countered that Judge Mehta should narrowly target his remedies. Specifically, they said, the court should look only at a group of deals that the company makes with Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and others to be the search engine that automatically appears in web browsers and smartphones. These deals were at the heart of the government’s case against the company.
Google’s proposal “directly responds to this court’s legal determinations, but it also does much more,” said John Schmidtlein, Google’s lead trial lawyer.
The outcome in the case, U.S. v. Google, could drastically change the Silicon Valley behemoth. Google faces mounting challenges, including a breakup of its ad technology business after a different federal judge ruled last week that the company held a monopoly over some of the tools that websites use to sell open ad space. In 2023, Google also lost an antitrust suit brought by the maker of the video game Fortnite, which accused the tech giant of violating competition laws with its Play app store.
The legal troubles could hurt Google as it battles OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta to lead a new era of artificial intelligence. Google has increasingly woven A.I. into its search. But the Justice Department has told Judge Mehta that he should make sure Google cannot parlay its search monopoly into similar dominance in A.I.
The Justice Department’s actions signal that the Trump administration plans to maintain government scrutiny of the tech industry. Apple, Meta and Amazon also face antitrust lawsuits from the U.S. government, with Meta in the second week of a trial over whether it illegally stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they were young companies.
The case over Google search was filed in 2020, under the first Trump administration. In 2023, Judge Mehta oversaw an eight-week trial in which the government argued that Google had subverted competition by striking deals to be the preselected search engine in web browsers and on the home screens of smartphones. The company paid $26.3 billion to companies like Apple and Samsung as part of those deals in 2021.
The government said those deals locked in Google’s control, putting its search engine in front of consumers looking for information, which gave the company more data to improve its search engine. That then attracted more consumers, entrenching the company’s dominance, the government said.
Google countered that consumers chose its search product simply because it was better than competitors like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo. The company also said it invested constantly to make its search engine the best.
Judge Mehta ultimately sided with the government. That kicked off a process to determine how to fix the competitive issues caused by Google’s monopoly.
Google has told the judge that little needs to change. It said it should still be allowed to pay for prime placement for its search engine in web browsers and on smartphones. But it said that some of those deals should be open for renegotiation every year and that companies should be allowed to choose a different preselected search engine for products like a private browsing mode.
The Justice Department has asked for wider changes that would restrict Google’s ability to reach users and give its competitors resources to compete with its search engine. It wants Judge Mehta to stop the company from making payments to browser makers and smartphone manufacturers to give its search engine prime placement.
It has also asked Judge Mehta to preserve the ability to force Google to sell Android, its smartphone operating system, if the remedies do not restore competition.
“Chrome is a significant gateway to search,” Mr. Dahlquist said, adding that billions of dollars in search revenue flows through the widely used browser. “The divestiture of Chrome, when finalized, will give rivals access to a significant number of search queries to help compete with Google.”
The government has also asked Judge Mehta to force Google to syndicate its search results and ads feed to its competitors, as well as provide other search engines with additional data they could use to improve their products.
Google said the request amounted to a giveaway for its rivals. The government’s proposal is “a wish list for competitors looking to get the benefits of Google’s extraordinary innovations and trade secrets that we’ve spent decades developing,” Mr. Schmidtlein, Google’s lawyer, said.
Judge Mehta asked questions throughout the opening statements. He pushed the government on whether existing court decisions supported its far-reaching proposal.
The government has encouraged Judge Mehta to think ahead to the battle for ownership of a technological era that may be defined by A.I. Mr. Dahlquist said the judge must ensure Google cannot use its search monopoly to gain control of the market for A.I. and said the company was already taking steps to ensure the dominance of one of its marquee products, its Gemini chatbot.
“This court’s remedy should be forward looking and not ignore what’s on the horizon,” he said. “Google is using the same strategy that they did for search and now applying it to Gemini.”
The government’s first witness, Greg Durrett, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, testified about the ways that Google’s search data fuels its A.I. products.
Mr. Schmidtlein had earlier countered that A.I. companies had no trouble reaching consumers, noting that ChatGPT, the popular chatbot developed by OpenAI, had been integrated by Apple into its operating system. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)
“I think ChatGPT is doing just fine without any of the remedies in the case,” Mr. Schmidtlein added.