Abigail Slater, US Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, speaks to reporters outside federal court in Washington, DC, on Monday, April 21, 2025. Google will face battle against the Justice Department and dozens of state attorneys general in a Washington courtroom over what modifications the judge will impose to prevent the corporation from monopolizing the online search industry.
Nearly a year ago, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta concluded that Google had improperly maintained a monopoly in the search engine market.
It was a decision that sent shockwaves across Silicon Valley and Washington.
Lawyers for Google and the Justice Department are back in court at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, DC. This time, Mehta is determining what fines he will levy against the roughly $2 trillion company.
Over the following few weeks, both sides will present evidence and are anticipated to call a slew of witnesses, including significant tech sector figures. According to court records, this includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of search engine competitor DuckDuckGo, as well as top VPs from Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, ChatGPT, and Google – but the roster may change.
Google has stated that it will appeal Mehta's verdict once the remedies portion of the trial is completed. The tech giant claims that the DOJ's proposed remedies are both harmful and "unprecedented," and would harm American consumers, the economy, and digital leadership and innovation. On Sunday, the night before the hearing, Google wrote a lengthy public blog post stating that the DOJ's "sweeping remedy ideas are both unneeded and detrimental."
On Monday morning, as she stood outside the courthouse, Gail Slater, the DOJ's Assistant Attorney for the Antitrust Decision, responded: "You know what is dangerous? Google poses a threat to our freedom of speech and digital market innovation.
Slater was joined by additional government attorneys, who read comments approximately an hour before the hearings began. They did not answer questions from the assembled journalists.
As the hearings began, two tables full of DOJ and Google lawyers sat elbow to elbow.
In his opening remarks, David Dahlquist, the acting deputy director of the Department of Justice's antitrust civil litigation section, represented the government. In a 45-minute presentation, he set out a series of tough requests that the government wants Google to implement.
The DOJ is urging the corporation to divest from Chrome, its online browser, and to terminate exclusive distribution deals with phone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung, under which Google paid them to make its search engine the default browser on their devices. The DOJ is also requesting that Judge Mehta block Google from adopting similar exclusive distribution agreements for its AI algorithms and apps, such as its Gemini chatbot. Dahlquist stated Monday.
"We are not looking for a Pyrrhic victory. "We are here to reestablish competitiveness," Dahlquist explained.
He described this as an inflection point. He questioned the court: Will the United States allow Google, a monopolist, to monopolize the search business, or will competition prevail?
The beginning of the end of a technological love affair.
The legal battle started in 2020, when the Justice Department filed an antitrust complaint against Google.
The government's main claim is that Google has an unfair advantage in the U.S. search market, with a valuation that exceeds $1 trillion. The DOJ's original complaint, filed alongside 11 state attorneys general, claimed that the firm made multibillion-dollar deals with Apple and Samsung to ensure that its search engine was the default on their phones' web browsers. According to the DOJ, these agreements essentially excluded Google's competitors. Google has disputed it.
This lawsuit marked the beginning of the end of the long-running love affair between the tech industry and Washington, DC. For many years, the technology industry grew with little regulatory oversight. However, major tech companies as Meta, Amazon, and Apple are now facing federal lawsuits.
The Federal Trade Commission has filed an antitrust complaint against Meta in the same venue where the Google remedy trial is taking place. The agency claims Meta exploited its power and acted like a monopoly by purchasing rivals in order to eliminate them as competitors.
And this is not the government's only lawsuit against Google; another one is set to be launched in 2023. Last week, a different federal judge concluded that Google's dominance in the online advertising and ad-tech businesses violates US antitrust rules.
What were the DOJ's arguments?
The government's most pressing request is that Judge Mehta order the tech corporation to sell off its popular Chrome browser.
According to Dahlquist, Chrome is a significant gateway to user queries, generating billions of dollars in search revenue for Google. It is the world's most popular search engine. Forcing Google to sell this portion of the corporation would "enable rivals to compete," he claimed. He described it as "a market truth" that Google's ownership of Chrome discourages the formation of new, competitive alternatives, which is a violation of federal antitrust rules.
Google, for its part, has emphatically rejected this suggestion.
The DOJ has also requested that Google discontinue its monthly third-party payments to phone manufacturers in order to ensure that its browser is the default option on those phones.
Dahlquist stated that Google has recommended removing the word "exclusive" from their agreements with Apple and other corporations, as well as any other browser distribution deal. "That is not enough," he argued, noting that Google may still sway other companies by leveraging existing base agreements and its capacity to offer big sums of money to phone manufacturers.
The government wants to take a step further and ensure that any solution precludes Google from entering into similar exclusivity arrangements for its generative AI products, such as Gemini. Dahlquist stated that the rise of Google's AI products could open up another industry for the corporation to dominate if exclusive contracts are allowed to continue - something they wish to prevent.
How did Google respond?
Google has long promised to appeal, but first it must go through the remedy trial process.
For the previous four years, the corporation has maintained that it has never operated as a monopoly and that any reforms, no matter how minor, are unneeded. The company's leaders have stated that their search tool outperforms competitors', which is why it dominates the business.
In opening arguments, Google's lawyer, John E. Schmidtlein, said that the DOJ's list of remedies in this case is simply a "wishlist for competitors," and that it will allow them to obtain resources that Google spent decades developing.
The DOJ's recommendations attempt "to prop up specific competitors," he stated.
Google sees the government's demand to divest from Chrome as its most restrictive and "extreme" requirement. The company's officials have stated that separating apart Chrome would disrupt the immensely popular feature, which Schmidtlein repeated in court. Google cannot abandon the Chrome browser without affecting other Google products, such as the Chrome operating system and Chromebook computers, he claimed.
Schmidtlein responded to the DOJ's efforts to ban Google from integrating Gemini in future exclusive distribution deals, stating that Gemini was not the subject of the antitrust action and that the business does not have a monopoly on AI technologies.
Schmidtlein cited the success of competitors' AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, MetaAI, and Grok, as proof that competition in this field is healthy and diverse. "The idea that ChatGPT can not be distributed is ludicrous. They have more distribution than anyone," he stated.
Why is this such a big deal?
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor of antitrust law at Vanderbilt Law School, notes that this is the government's largest antitrust action in decades.
"This case is incredibly important. "It is difficult to emphasize," she stated. "It is at least as significant as the Microsoft case, which was the last big antitrust case we had. And that happened 25 years ago.
That Microsoft case, filed in 1998, included the business bundling its browser, Internet Explorer, with its Windows operating system. It almost broke the firm in two, but Microsoft and the DOJ reached an agreement.
Allensworth also compared it to the Justice Department's 1906 Standard Oil case, usually regarded as the first big monopoly case. A federal court eventually determined that the oil company headed by John D. Rockefeller improperly monopolized the American refining sector. As a result, Standard Oil was required to split into around 40 separate firms.
Allensworth stated that the outcome of this phase of Google's trial is difficult to predict. However, insisting that Google disengage from Chrome is not impossible.
Google provides financial support to NPR.
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