The Ministry of Justice has indicated that it is considering dismantling Google to combat its monopolistic practices in online search. A tool which has become rare in recent decades, and whose implementation raises many unknowns.
In August 2024, following a complaint filed in 2020 by the Ministry of Justice (Department of JusticeDOJ) and several American states, Judge Amit P. Mehta concluded that Google LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet, held a monopoly on online search, and that the company was abusing it.
On October 8, this same judge gave in a 32-page document (.pdf) further details on the measures he plans to correct the situation. Among the latter, he indicates that he is thinking about “structural and behavioral measures that would prevent Google from using products like Chrome, Play and Android to benefit Google search or products and features related to Google search”.
In other words, he mentions a potential separation of the browser, the application store or the smartphone operating system from Google to prevent it from continuing to systematically favor its search engine.
The company hastened to respond that the proposals «radicals» from the Ministry of Justice “risked harm to consumers, businesses and developers”.
Recurring accusations of monopolistic practices, much rarer dismantling
But how should we consider the hypothesis of such dismantling? The last major affair leading to a dismantling in the United States dates back to 1984 (no Orwell in this affair), and the separation of the telecoms giant AT&T from several of its subsidiaries – an operation which “only made people happy”headlined Les Échos in 1999.
It was that year that a new antitrust case made headlines: Microsoft was accused of abuse of dominant position for having forced PC manufacturers to install Internet Explorer on all machines using Windows. First condemned to dismantling, the company won its appeal and ended up reaching an agreement with the Ministry of Justice in which it agreed to modify some of its practices.
Since then, accusations of monopolistic practices have continued for various tech giants – Apple is being sued, the FTC is investigating the activities of Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft in terms of AI, etc.
Fines are falling, too: Google itself has been condemned on multiple occasions, particularly in Europe, for abuse of a dominant position: in 2017, the European Commission fined it 2.42 billion euros for privileges unduly given to Google Shopping on its search engine. In 2018, a 4.3 billion euro fine followed, this time for abuse of a dominant position on Android: the company was found guilty of having imposed its search engine and browser as conditions for granting the license for its Play Store.
Even in the United States, Google must defend itself against two other accusations: at the end of 2023, the courts found monopolistic practices on the Play Store in the lawsuit between the company and Epic; and it has yet to rule on accusations of monopoly in the advertising technology (adtech) market — an issue similar to that currently being dealt with in Europe, but about which the antitrust watchdogs should not call for a dismantling, contrary to what the Commission could have predicted.
However, there is no recent example of dismantling on a scale similar to that of Google. The form that a division of the company would actually take would be complex, Axios rightly points out: even if Alphabet tries to develop other activities, its income remains largely derived from research activity.
As for Chrome and Android, they are both largely built on open source code, and provided free to customers, which raises many questions about how to turn them into independent businesses.
A decision planned for August 2025
Above all, the document (.pdf) shared on October 8 by Judge Mehta is for the moment only a preliminary version of the measures he could request from the DoJ, a version which must be finalized by the end of November.
In detail, the measures envisaged by Judge Mehta aim to respond to four specific issues: the distribution of searches and the sharing of Google’s revenues, the generation and display of search results, the scale and monetization of the advertising, and the accumulation and use of data.
To answer this, the judge puts forward the possibility of creating “contractual requirements and prohibitions, non-discrimination requirements for products, data and interoperability requirements, as well as structural requirements”. Google could, for example, be banned from contracts like the one it signed with Apple to be the search engine configured by default on Safari.
The company may also have to share data relating to its index and search patterns and other data relating to its ad ranking. The judge also raises the possibility of preventing it from using or recycling data that cannot be shared with its competitors for reasons of privacy protection.
For Google, data sharing obligations would create excessive security and privacy risks. It indicates that corrections to its advertising system would affect the entire advertising market, and “would make online ads less attractive to publishers and marketers, and less useful to consumers”. Above all, the company describes many of the measures discussed as the source of future friction for consumers and damage to businesses and innovation in the United States.
The debate will not be settled just yet: the decision on the measures actually adopted is expected to be made in August 2025 – and Google’s president of global affairs has already warned that the company will appeal, which would mean several more years of procedure.
