A Brand New Internet? DOJ’s Plan to Pursue Google Breakup Remakes Online Life

Senior reporter Karina Montoya discusses the U.S. Department of Justice's recent proposal to break up Google's search monopoly by requiring the company to divest its Chrome browser and potentially its Android operating system, aiming to enhance competition in the digital market.

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Amid reports that Google asked the Trump administration to spare it from a breakup in the case it faces for its search monopoly, the U.S. Department of Justice and 33 plaintiff states reaffirmed their request to have Google divest Chrome — and  Android, if competition doesn’t increase in five years — in their revised remedies submitted to court last Friday.

This new submission illustrates the complexity of having to pry open markets that have been dominated for so long by a single corporation. But by reaffirming the core of its initial plan to restructure Google, the DOJ has moved the U.S. much closer to what could prove to be a radical reordering of corporate power over communications and commerce on the internet.

Besides a breakup, the DOJ also upheld its proposal for Google to offer syndication licenses of its search indexes — the collections of data that make the web ‘searchable’ —  at marginal cost and under non-discriminatory terms. In practice, this would reduce costs for rivals to access Google’s massive storage of websites and ranking signals, while giving them freedom to display search results differently from Google. Years before the Google trial, Daniel Hanley, senior legal analyst at Open Markets Institute had also put forward this type of solution to increase competition in search.

Lawyers who work for Google competitors believe this would increase competition in search ads as well. “The syndication license also imposes interoperability obligations on Google to ensure it supports a competitor’s ability to make money out of search text ads using Google’s search index,” Tim Cowen, chair of antitrust at the UK law firm Preiskel & Co., told Open Markets. “In effect, this is a part of reseller obligations applied in telecoms where wholesale access is being provided to support retail competitors,” he added.

In their statement, the DOJ and the states did make significant compromises. For example, the DOJ replaced an outright ban on Google’s AI investments with a prior notification requirement of any plans to invest in AI or search, be it through partnerships, joint ventures, or acquisitions — including plans to expand existing deals. The provision may prove tactically valuable in court as a way to refute Google’s arguments that the DOJ’s main goal is to harm the corporation.

With this measure, the DOJ would effectively create a special vigilance framework complementary to the scope of the Hart–Scott–Rodino Act. As the Federal Trade Commission showed in a 2020 investigation, many Big Tech acquisitions fall through the cracks of the HSR Act reporting requirements.

An ultimate victory for the DOJ would also be transformative for web publishers and individual creators, in two ways. One is related to data for AI training. The new plan expands the DOJ’s November proposal prohibiting exclusionary agreements for content collection between Google and web publishers to include current agreements. This would stop Google from using AI content deals to lock in data for itself and block it for everyone else, as in the deal it struck with Reddit.

The second way is by giving web publishers — especially news media — more control of their content flowing across Google platforms while also providing them stronger protections from retaliation. The DOJ upheld and expanded the opt-out standard for web publishers to take their content out of AI model training without disappearing from Google’s search index. If approved, when web publisher or creator opts out of any Google AI product, including AI Overviews, Google cannot punish them on its search index, or on any other Google product (such as YouTube or AdSense).

Some believe these remedies will encourage stronger enforcement — and perhaps stronger laws — in Europe and elsewhere. “Overall, the plaintiffs’ legal theory on effective remedies and the resulting demands […] are very compelling,” said lawyer Thomas Höppner, a counsel to several complainants against Google, including in landmark EU cases. “They should serve as a guidance for the overdue reform of remedies in European competition law.”

Taken together, the DOJ’s decision to stay the course is an encouraging sign the Trump Administration will build on President Biden’s strong enforcement record. Then again, it’s worth remembering the Reagan Administration’s early record on antitrust.

The Reagan DOJ, for instance, opted to pursue a case against AT&T that was first filed by the Ford Administration in 1974. This resulted in the breakup of that corporation in 1982, an action that spurred a series of technological advances that helped lay the foundations for today’s internet.

But the case also notched the high water mark of antitrust enforcement under the Reagan White House, which almost immediately thereafter abandoned America’s long tradition of strong antimonopoly enforcement by embracing the pro-monopoly “Consumer Welfare” philosophy.

This article was featured in The Corner Newsletter: Mark 15th, 2025

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