Surprise, surprise. It looks like US President Donald Trump agrees with his predecessor Joe Biden about something at least – the much-changed Justice Department apparently still wants Google to be broken up. That’s bad news for all the other large tech firms out there.
“Through its sheer size and unrestricted power, Google has robbed consumers and businesses of a fundamental promise owed to the public – their right to choose among competing services,” the DOJ said in the filing last week.
Most observers were not expecting that. On the contrary, it was largely assumed that the Trump-led DOJ would use this one last chance to alter the Biden-era suggestion to the judge that Google be broken up.
“Must divest the Chrome browser”
After all, Republicans are usually business-friendly and don’t like antitrust, broadly speaking. Plus, the big tech bosses are now all trying to stay on good terms with the Trump administration in the hopes it keeps its claws away from their ultra-large companies.
The lobbying was intense but the reprieve didn’t happen. The DOJ stated in its final proposal that “Google must divest the Chrome browser” and said that rivals should have an “opportunity to operate a significant gateway to search the internet, free of Google’s monopoly control.”
In fact, many of the measures prosecutors proposed in November remain intact with a few tweaks. And even though the Trump new cycle is very short, sort of tantrum-to-tantrum, it looks like he is keeping his word and continuing a crackdown on big tech.
“This is a rare and somewhat surprising example of a reinforcement of the previous administration's efforts, and the first signal of the Trump Justice Department's approach to antitrust litigation,” Damian Rollison, SOCi’s director of market insights, told Cybernews.
In February, Chrome made up two-thirds of the global browser market, far more than Safari (17.99%), Edge (5.33%), Firefox (2.62%), and Samsung Internet (2.3%). Opera, Europe’s largest homegrown browser, made up just 2.09%.
The DOJ also asked the judge to block Google from contracts that secure its search engine as the default across dozens of devices such as smartphones made by Apple, Samsung, and others.
This is obviously not good news for Apple. In 2021 alone, Google paid $26 billion for default search placements, and most of the money went to Apple.
“The American dream is about higher values than just cheap goods and ‘free’ online services. These values include freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to innovate, and freedom to compete in a market undistorted by the controlling hand of a monopolist,” prosecutors wrote.
Not a good sign for other firms
That’s the crux of it – the DOJ’s stance hurts essentially every big US tech player. Of course, for more meaningful conclusions, the industry will have to wait until Google appeals and the trial, scheduled for April, ends.
But Apple, Meta, and Amazon are also facing allegations of maintaining illegal monopolies in their respective markets. That’s why what the DOJ says and does in the Trump era is significant.
“Apple, Amazon, and Meta are indeed closely watching the DOJ’s recent actions to determine how the new administration will treat their cases. Their hopes for a more lenient approach may now be tempered,” said Craig Smith, an IP litigation attorney in Boston.
Rollison agrees: “The willingness of the Trump Justice Department to reinforce and continue prior actions against big tech has dangerous implications for Meta and Apple as well, given the cases they face in the next several months.”
Meta has scrapped fact-checking initiatives on Facebook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is apparently censoring The Washington Post, and all of the larger firms have rolled back their longstanding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Competitors aren’t sleeping and are also calling for Google to divest Android, its operating system. Murena, a French company building privacy-first smartphones and tablets, is arguing for precisely this.
“Google is only able to offer Android free of charge to users because it profits off them in so many other ways and markets. This makes it almost impossible for other providers in the OS market to compete, and so the cycle of domination continues,” said Murena’s COO Rik Viergever.
Carrots and sticks
To Rollison, it looks like Google’s operations might suffer, and the tech market could change in a not insignificant way: “The dominance of a few small companies in tech may be facing a more substantive challenge than at any time in our history.”
But he also thinks that even mere threats of antitrust action could work like leverage in the administration's further effort to keep the tech giants in line.
Meta has scrapped fact-checking initiatives on Facebook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is apparently censoring The Washington Post, and all of the larger firms have rolled back their longstanding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
That’s what the Trump administration wanted – and it got it. We’re not going to find out exactly what’s going on behind the scenes but the White House might have pressured the tech giants into complying by wielding the antitrust axe over their heads.
“Threats of antitrust action may end up acting as leverage in the Trump administration's effort to influence tech company policies,” said Rollison.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Trump's DOJ has thrown Google a carrot, too. One significant change in the department’s position is its view on AI investments – the agency has backed off of its request to have Google divest from its investments in AI.
More specifically, the DOJ dropped a proposal to force Google to sell its investments in AI companies, including OpenAI competitor Anthropic, because that “could cause unintended consequences in the evolving AI space.”
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