DOJ Sets Record Straight of What’s Needed to Dismantle Google’s Search Monopoly

Karina Montoya researches and reports on broad media competition issues and data privacy at the Center for Journalism & Liberty, a program of the Open Markets Institute, in Washington, D.C.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has cemented its position that Google’s monopoly over search will not be dismantled without structural separations. Despite reports that Google asked the Trump administration to spare it from a break-up, last Friday, the DOJ reaffirmed its request to have Google divest Chrome as part of the remedies the agency is slated to defend before DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta starting on April 21.

As many have pointed out, the DOJ’s revised remedies show the enforcer has indeed kept the core of the original request it submitted in November 2024, including strong behavioral remedies, such as opening Google’s search index to the rest of the market, giving publishers and advertisers more control of their data flowing through Google’s products, and imposing public oversight over Google’s AI investments.

Taken together, the DOJ’s revisions reveal the complexity of having to pry open a market with the levels of entrenchment Google has secured. Ending Google’s revenue sharing with Apple — which is Google’s focus — is, at this point, low-hanging fruit to deliberate in the remedies trial. In fact, the DOJ is now proposing that Apple can receive other payments from Google as long as they are not coming from search or any other search access point and are not used to circumvent any of the self-preferencing prohibitions.

By now, the DOJ’s stance is abundantly clear: to restore competition in search, one has to go beyond the Google-Apple revenue share and look at the interdependencies Google has created to lock in users, creators, publishers, and advertisers to monopolize search; how all this has foreclosed real competition, and how Google may continue to leverage its ill-gotten gains to continue protecting its current monopoly or create future ones.

In anticipation of the trial, here’s a breakdown of the changes in the DOJ’s revised remedies likely to be the focus of the proceedings.

Break-Ups: Chrome and Android

The most contentious item in the remedies list is the divestiture of the Chrome browser. This will be key if the goal is to do away with Google’s self-preferencing in search. This would be a separation not only from Google’s search engine operations but the entire corporation. The revised remedies now include more detail about who would qualify as a buyer, and it clarifies that the US government will assess the buyer and the potential threats to national security it may pose, including user data protection. Importantly, the DOJ now seeks to prevent Google from dropping the ball in supporting the functionality of Chrome in the case the divestiture is ordered or during a potential appeals process.

The request to have Google divest Android is still part of the DOJ’s proposal, but only as a contingency remedy if all else fails to restore competition. In the initial proposal, a divestiture of Android was offered for Google to execute in replacement of complying with various self-preferencing prohibitions affecting Android. Not that Google would have done it, but we can expect this contingency relief to be highly contested as well.

Investments on AI

Reuters rightly touted that a key change in the revised remedies is that the DOJ has dropped its request for Google to sell its current investment in AI companies. Instead, the DOJ is requesting to impose a prior notification provision for Google’s future investments in AI and search (partnerships, joint ventures, collaborations, acquisitions), including expansions of existing investments.

This is indeed an important change. Although the most effective way to prevent Google from fortifying its monopoly is to prevent further acquisitions, this change still conveys the need for special public oversight that, in this case, would enable the DOJ and states to challenge Google’s future transactions in AI and search before they are executed.

The prior notification provision also sends another message to the market: the technology sector suffers from extreme concentration, and special public oversight — complementary to the scope of the Hart–Scott–Rodino Act — has become necessary.

The fact is that a key argument for giant corporations to fend off criticism that their acquisitions further concentrate markets and hurt competition is that many of such deals don’t meet the thresholds of the HSR Act. Thus, those deals are innocuous per se, and regulators have nothing to scrutinize. However, a closer examination of Big Tech’s acquisitions, as the Federal Trade Commission carried out in 2020, shows that it is relatively easy for many transactions to fall through the cracks of the HSR Act reporting requirements.

Rival search engines and potential new entrants

Another important component of the remedies is to open Google’s search index and search ads to the rest of the market and regulate Google’s provision of these indexes and other functionalities under non-discriminatory terms. The DOJ has kept this request and added more information on the types of data Google should make available via syndication licenses, data privacy protection measures, and who would qualify as a competitor to access such data. We can expect a lot of technical discussions around this proposal during the trial.

Compulsory licensing under non-discriminatory terms can be just as transformative as a structural separation; it would distribute Google’s unfairly obtained advantages to the rest of the market. Competitors such as DuckDuckGo publicly supported this remedy before the DOJ put forward its remedies list. Even before the Google monopoly trial was on the horizon, Daniel Hanley, senior legal analyst at Open Markets Institute – my employer – also proposed this type of licensing as part of the solution to restore competition in search.

Some analysts also point out that this framework follows known regulations in telecom. Tim Cowen, chair of antitrust at the UK law firm Preiskel & Co, highlighted that the syndication license also imposes interoperability obligations on Google to ensure it would support a competitor’s ability to make money out of search text ads using Google’s search index. “In effect, it’s a part of a set of reseller obligations applied in telecoms where wholesale access is being provided to support retail competitors,” he said in an email.

News publishers, social media, and individual creators

The remedies trial can also be transformative for any person or business creating content discoverable by a search engine. The DOJ proposal to prohibit exclusionary agreements between Google and web publishers has been expanded to include current agreements. This would prevent Google from abusing its AI deals to lock in content for AI training and block it for everyone else, as happened last year with Reddit.

The DOJ has also further clarified and expanded the opt-out standard for web publishers to remove their content from AI training data without getting erased from Google’s search index. The provision now says Google must enable such AI opt-out on a model-by-model basis without affecting the publisher or creator’s inclusion in any other Google product or feature.

This is extremely important. If approved by the judge, whenever a web publisher or creator chooses to opt out of any Google AI product or model, including AI Overviews, they would be protected from being penalized not only on Google’s search index but also on any other Google product such as YouTube, AdSense, or search tabs Google creates in the future.

Next Steps Leading to April 21

This is not an exhaustive list of changes in the DOJ’s remedies proposal. But at this point, it’s fair to say the DOJ and the plaintiff states are unmoved in taking their proposal to trial. Some of the revisions, such as allowing certain payments from Google to Apple unrelated to search, may make it more difficult for Google to portray the DOJ as an enforcer who doesn’t understand the market and is oblivious to the unintended consequences of restructuring it.

From now until April 21, all parties must resolve each other’s questions about produced and pending evidence, depose witnesses, and determine the use of confidential information. The AI company Anthropic, which was seeking to submit an amicus brief and provide witness accounts as evidence, is also slated to update the court this week on whether it will continue pursuing those efforts.

Many following this case are relieved the DOJ is maintaining its course; others have pointed to how the remedies underscore a strong bipartisan consensus for antitrust enforcement, especially in a sector that not only effectively governs how Americans communicate and discover information but also has tremendous power over the development of AI systems.

Be that as it may, it’s worth remembering that Google CEO Sundar Pichai had a privileged seat on President Donald Trump’s inauguration day. As much as it may be clear today that the DOJ and the states are not showing signs of reversing their course to unwind Google’s power, we can’t say the same about potential new conversations with the Trump administration or lobbying efforts Google may have underway.