In a sign that President Trump is following the Biden administration’s lead in reining in Google, the Justice Department on Friday reiterated its demand that a court break up the search giant.
The request followed a landmark ruling last year by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that found Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search by paying web browsers and smartphone manufacturers to feature its search engine. The judge is scheduled to hear arguments on proposed solutions from both the government and Google in April.
Under the Biden administration last year, the Justice Department asked Judge Mehta in a preliminary filing to force Google to sell its popular web browser, Chrome, among other remedies. The department’s lawyers on Friday reiterated that demand, which could reshape internet competition.
“Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that — no matter what occurs — Google always wins,” the government said in its Friday filing. “The American people thus are forced to accept the unbridled demands and shifting, ideological preferences of an economic leviathan in return for a search engine the public may enjoy.”
The Justice Department’s decision to stick with its sweeping proposal to fundamentally alter the $2 trillion company’s business is one of the first signals from the new administration on how it may approach tech regulation. The requests, the most significant remedies proposed in a tech monopoly case since the Justice Department asked to break up Microsoft in 2000, could presage how Mr. Trump’s appointees will handle a string of other antitrust cases that challenge the dominance of tech behemoths.
The Justice Department has also sued Google over its dominance in advertising technology, a case awaiting a ruling, as well as Apple over claims that its tightly knit system of devices and software makes it challenging for consumers to leave. A Federal Trade Commission case against Meta, over claims that Meta snuffed out competition when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp, is scheduled to go to trial in April. The agency has also sued Amazon, accusing it of illegally protecting a monopoly in online retail.
The tech industry is closely watching Mr. Trump’s choices to lead those agencies as it tries to determine his approach to regulation. The antitrust cases against the tech giants stem from investigations that began during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Andrew Ferguson, the new chairman of the F.T.C., has expressed concern about the tech giants’ power as a gatekeeper to online discourse. Gail Slater, Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said during her Senate confirmation hearing that she was worried someone “can be disappeared from the internet quite easily when there are only two platforms providing news, for example, to the American people.”
Tech executives have visited Mar-a-Lago in recent months to court the president’s favor, and have donated millions of dollars to Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Chief executives including Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta sat behind Mr. Trump during his inauguration.
The first major test of the Trump administration’s approach to concerns about Big Tech’s power will be how it proceeds in the Google search case.
During a 10-week trial in 2023, the government said Google locked out rivals by signing deals with Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and others to automatically appear as the search engine when users opened a smartphone or new tab in a web browser. Google paid $26.3 billion for those arrangements in 2021, according to evidence presented at the trial.
Google argued that its deals had not broken the law, and that users chose its search engine because it was better at finding information than rivals like Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo, which claims to offer its users more privacy than search engines that collect more information to target users with ads.
After Judge Mehta ruled in August that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly, the Justice Department proposed last year that the company be forced to to sell Chrome. It also suggested at the time a sale of Android, Google’s smartphone operating system, unless Google changed some of its policies.
The government asked the court to stop Google from entering into paid agreements with Apple, Mozilla and smartphone makers to be the default search engine on smartphones and in browsers. The company should also allow rival search engines to display Google’s results and have access to its data for a decade, the government said in its filing at the time.
Google had urged Judge Mehta to take a narrower approach. It asked that it continue to be allowed to pay other companies to give its search engine prime placement in web browsers and on smartphones. But it said those agreements should be less restrictive than in the past and allow other search engines to compete for prime placement on phones and browsers. In addition, browser manufacturers like Apple and Mozilla should be allowed to change their default search engines at least every 12 months, the company said.
Judge Mehta is scheduled next month to preside over an almost two-week hearing to determine remedies in the case, which will feature testimony and arguments from lawyers for both sides.
