Justice Department Reiterates Demand to Break Up Google
**Justice Department Reiterates Demand to Break Up Google**
By Erin Woo
5 hours ago
Source: The Information
The Department of Justice, in a filing Friday, reaffirmed its demand that a federal court should force Google to sell its Chrome browser to remedy the company's illegal search monopoly.
In the filing Friday, the Justice Department reiterated many aspects of its proposed final judgment, including prohibitions on payments to Apple and other companies for a share of search revenue or preferential treatment of its search engine, which formed the centerpiece of U.S. district court judge Amit Mehta's ruling last August that Google's search engine was an illegal monopoly.
However, the Justice Department dropped its request that Google be prohibited from making investments in artificial intelligence companies. Anthropic, the AI model developer that had received billions of dollars in funding from Google, had criticized that part of the proposed judgment.
The filing signals that the Trump Administration's Department of Justice could continue the Biden Administration's aggressive antitrust stance. Also on Friday, Google filed its own proposed final judgment, which focuses much more narrowly on stopping its payments for preferential search treatment. A hearing in the case is expected for next month, and Mehta has said that he aims to issue a final ruling on the remedies in August.