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Google Must Sell Chrome, Exit Browser Business for Five Years, Prosecutors Argue
By: MT Newswires | November 21, 2024

Alphabet's GOOG Google must sell its Chrome browser and take other major steps to end its monopoly on internet searches, the US Justice Department and a group of states said in a filing on Wednesday.

Google denounced the proposed measures as "extreme."

Among the proposed measures for ending what a judge has already ruled was Google's illegal monopoly on general search services and search text advertising were selling its Android operating system and being barred for five years from owning or acquiring any investment or interest in any search or search text ad rival, distributor, or query-based AI product or ads technology.

"Google's financial entanglements with current or future rivals risk compromising the proposed remedy," the prosecutors said in the filing. "Investments in or acquisitions of potential rivals would stifle emerging competition or reduce their incentives to challenge Google."

Other proposed remedies include disallowing Google from cutting deals with manufacturers to set itself as the default search engine in devices, forcing Google to increase performance and price transparency to advertisers, ordering it to share data with rivals, and barring it from making exclusive deals that hurt rivals.

Google said in a post that the Department of Justice "chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America's global technology leadership."

The company said the "wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the court's decision. It would break a range of Google products - even beyond Search - that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives."

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