Alphabet’s Google has called a US justice department plan to force it to sell its Chrome web browser “extreme” and at odds with the law, urging a federal court judge to take caution lest he stifle innovation and future investment.
In a court filing in the US over the weekend, Google responded to the justice department’s request and proposed its own remedy. The company said the proposed Chrome sale doesn’t fit the company’s conduct that the judge found illegal — which involved exclusive contracts with browsers, smartphone manufacturers and telecom carriers.
“Extreme remedies are discouraged” by courts, the company said in its filing. The remedies for anticompetitive conduct “must be of the ‘same type or class’ as the violations”, Google said.
The justice department and a group of states last month asked Judge Amit Mehta to order Google to sell its Chrome web browser along with other changes to the company’s business to improve competition in the online search market.
Google said any remedy should allow competing browsers like Apple’s Safari “to have the freedom to do deals with whatever search engine they think is best for their users”, Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s vice-president for regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post. Judge Mehta found it was unlawful for Google to make payments to Apple and others to be the default browser provider.
Ms Mulholland said Google’s proposal would still allow for the company to split revenue with competing browsers but would also allow for multiple defaults on different platforms. It would let device makers preload multiple search engines and not require them to include Chrome and Google search if they want to include other Google apps.
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Kamyl Bazbaz, spokesman for search engine competitor DuckDuckGo, said the proposal attempts to maintain the status quo.
“Once a court finds a violation of competition laws, the remedy must not only stop the illegal conduct and prevent its recurrence, but restore competition in the affected markets,” he said.
Google’s filing is its first official response since the judge found earlier this year that it illegally monopolised online search and advertising markets. The company has said it plans to appeal, but can’t do so until after the case finishes.
“If DOJ [department of justice] felt that Google investing in Chrome, or our development of AI, or the way we crawl the web, or develop our algorithms, were at all anticompetitive, it could have filed those cases. It did not,” Ms Mulholland wrote.
The judge has scheduled a proceeding in April to decide how to fix the dearth of competition in the industries Google has dominated and promised to have a final decision by August 2025.
A justice department spokeswoman declined to comment and referred to the agency’s earlier filings in the case. — Bloomberg/Reuters
