The Department of Justice asks court to force Google to spin off Chrome

The US government formally proposed a partial breakup of Google on Wednesday, urging a federal judge to force a sale of the company’s Chrome web browser after a landmark ruling this year finding that Google had violated US antitrust law with its search business.

The US government formally proposed a partial breakup of Google on Wednesday, urging a federal judge to force a sale of the company’s Chrome web browser after a landmark ruling this year finding that Google had violated US antitrust law with its search business. The request by the Justice Department and a group of states opens the door to the most significant antitrust penalties for a tech giant in a generation, targeting not only Google’s illegal monopoly in search but also its growing ambitions in artificial intelligence. If approved, the penalties could revolutionize how millions of Americans search for information and potentially disrupt the tight integration among many of Google’s key products and services. Google has promised to appeal; the company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday’s filing. The high-profile case focused on whether the tactics that made Google the default search engine in Chrome – as well as on iPhones, Android devices and more – were anticompetitive, shutting out smaller search engines from the market. In their court filing this week, antitrust enforcers said that a spinoff of Chrome, which is used on billions of devices worldwide, could help prevent an illegal monopoly from recurring. “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 government lawyers wrote. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”