The Justice Department’s request that Alphabet Inc.’s Google sell its popular Chrome browser and, potentially, its Android mobile operating system, would not just reshape a tech giant worth $2 trillion but send tsunami-like waves throughout the tech industry. Just don’t expect it to happen any time soon, if at all, say legal experts and industry analysts.
“I think if anything is divested (odds he rates as miniscule), it’s court ordered and Chrome is spun off,” Abiel Garcia, a partner at Kesselman, Brantly & Stockinger and a former deputy attorney general in California’s antitrust department, said in an interview. “But I don’t think Google will voluntarily spin off Android. Google’s position is clear that it thinks everything it’s done has benefited consumers and by divesting either Chrome or Android, it will actually hurt consumers.”
The request is part of a court-ordered fix to Google’s monopolization of the online search market following the federal government’s victory in an antitrust case that is likely to wend through courts for years. (Additionally, the government asked the judge to force Google to shed its stakes in AI companies like Anthropic that could compete with search engines. News surfaced on Friday that Amazon pumped another $4 billion into Anthropic.)
“Google has manipulated its control of Chrome and Android to benefit itself, while sharing monopoly profits under conditions to induce third parties across the ecosystem to help Google maintain its monopolies,” the DoJ said in a filing to federal judge Amit Mehta late Wednesday. “The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired. … The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”
Whether a breakup actually happens is another matter, especially during an AI era marked by blur-fast change and with an incoming Trump administration that is likely to be more accommodating to Big Tech than President Joe Biden and his team.
Former FTC General Counsel Alden Abbott argues splintering Google would “destroy key integrative efficiencies and reduce welfare.” He expects the Trump administration will withdraw the break-up recommendation.
“I view it as highly unlikely that Judge Mehta would endorse such a harmful ‘remedy,'” Abbott said in an email. “Rather, it is far more likely that the judge would endorse a behavioral non-structural remedy, such as the rewriting of key Google contracts.”
“The recommendation of a breakup and an actual breakup are two very different things,” Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, says. “While regulators may suggest Google shed the Chrome asset, practically speaking it will take years in court to get a ruling and years beyond that before the appeals are completed and any sort of enforcement of the ruling is applied.”
Given the blistering pace of change around artificial intelligence (AI), large language models (LLM), and AI agents, Newman sees the recommendation as a “great posture to show a tough-on-Big Tech approach, but I simply don’t see it happening in a timeline that will be relevant.”
When the Justice Department attempted to split up Microsoft Corp. in the 1990s, that case took years to unspool. Microsoft emerged largely unscathed after making some concessions.
Since then, the tech industry has mushroomed into a behemoth that drives the global economy with a handful of its top players boasting market valuations of more than $1 billion.
In a note Friday, Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities’ global head of technology research, said the consensus among legal experts “continues to be that a structural remedy remains unlikely, but the court may decide that Google will need to offer search engine choice for users, potentially on its own products like Chrome.”
Google has a month to respond with its own proposal for Mehta, who plans to hold hearings on Google’s punishment beginning in April 2025 and issue a decision in August. Google’s likely appeal of that ruling could delay any sanctions for months or years.
“[The] DOJ’s proposal would literally require us to install not one but two separate choice screens before you could access Google Search on a Pixel phone you bought. And the design of those choice screens would have to be approved by the Technical Committee. We wish we were making this up,” Google Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker said in a blog post Thursday, in which he called Justice’s proposal “staggering.”
Any significant change to Google’s business carries with it enormous implications for the tech industry and the overall economy. Chrome commands two-thirds of the world’s browser market, and Android has about 71% of the smartphone market. Google’s default search engine on Chrome and Android handles about 90% of the world’s web searches, according to Statcounter.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh said Chrome, with more than 3 billion monthly active users, could be worth between $15 billion and $20 billion.
Indeed, Chrome “is more than just a browser — it is a linchpin in Alphabet’s ecosystem, connecting users to services such as Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Chrome generates substantial ad revenue by driving traffic to Google’s platforms and collecting user data to enhance its advertising algorithms. This central role underscores why the DOJ’s proposed action could disrupt Alphabet’s revenue streams and strategic operations,” Murthy Grandhi, company profiles analyst at GlobalData, said in a report.
For the first nine months this year, he said, Google generated an estimated $192 billion in advertising.
Then there is the political calculus: Trump does not have a particularly chummy relationship with Google, while the CEOs of Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. have been in contact with the president-elect and publicly congratulated him on his win.
But the mercurial Trump is notoriously unpredictable. It was his Justice Department, for instance, that initiated antitrust investigations of Big Tech in June 2019, and will most likely pursue a case against Apple and its app store next year.
Perhaps the only safe bet is that the incoming administration will hover anticompetitive investigations over large tech companies like a cudgel to keep them in line while otherwise assuming a more friendly posture through deregulation and lower corporate taxes.
“We believe there will be major shifts in policy against Big Tech over the coming years with Trump in the White House and [Lina] Khan out at the FTC [as chair],” Ives said Friday. “We believe it is just a matter of time and will remove a huge thorn in the side of the tech world. While the DOJ will continue its aggressive stance against Big Tech, the reality is many of these swirls against Big Tech will ultimately be more bark than bite in our view.”
