Last summer, a federal judge ruled that Google (GOOGL) has an illegal monopoly in online search — in part by paying web browsers and smartphone manufacturers such as Apple (AAPL) and Samsung to feature its search engine. Now, Google is headed to court to figure out exactly what that ruling means for the company.
In a three-week hearing that starts Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Amit P. Mehta will hear testimony — including expected testimony from CEO Sundar Pichai and from company partners such as Apple and Mozilla — to determine what the future will look like for the $1.9 trillion Silicon Valley giant.
The Justice Department has asked for heavy penalties for Google, including forcing the company to sell its Chrome browser and making the company give rivals some of its data about what terms people search for and what websites they click on.
“Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that — no matter what occurs — Google always wins,” the government said in a Friday filing. “The American people thus are forced to accept the unbridled demands and shifting, ideological preferences of an economic leviathan in return for a search engine the public may enjoy.”
The government has also asked the judge to give the company’s competitors a boost — allowing them to take Google’s search results and ads and display them for their users. And the DOJ said that if the court’s actions failed to improve search-engine competition, it might want to force Google to spin off its smartphone iOS, Android.
Google, meanwhile, has said it will ultimately appeal Mehta’s ruling in this case.
The company has offered its own proposal to address the judge’s concerns: changing… almost nothing. The search giant asked Mehta to allow it to continue to pay other companies for prime placement, although the company conceded that those agreements would be less restrictive than those in the past. Cellphone makers using Google’s Android operating system could also install other search engines, and users would be able to install Google apps without installing its search tool or its Gemini AI assistant.
“We don’t propose these changes lightly,” Google vice president of regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a blog post. “But we believe that they fully address the court’s findings, and do so without putting Americans’ privacy and security at risk or harming America’s global technology leadership.”
Mehta is expected to order the remedies in the case by the end of the summer.
Google faces other mounting issues, putting the company in an especially vulnerable position. In a separate antitrust Thursday, a federal judge ruled that it had illegally maintained a monopoly in some of its online advertising technology. As a result, the company might have to break up its ad operations. And the FTC in Japan recently sent the company a cease-and-desist order after it said Google’s search practices were monopolistic.
Damian Rollison, director of market insights of AI-powered SOCi, told Quartz last week that Google is on the verge of major changes.
“This year will be one where Google’s fate hangs in the balance,” he said. ‘The company stands to lose a lot more in material terms if its ad business, long its main source of revenue, is broken up, whereas divisions like Chrome are more strategically important.”
Any significant restrictions on Google could limit its ability to compete in the AI realm with companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft (MSFT), and Meta (META).
In a separate blog post, Google’s Mulholland called this lawsuit “a backwards-looking case at a time of intense competition and unprecedented innovations.” She added that “with new services like ChatGPT (and foreign competitors like DeepSeek) thriving, DOJ’s sweeping remedy proposals are both unnecessary and harmful.”
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, will report earnings Thursday amid its legal setbacks. While investors are hoping to see continued AI progress and cost control, shares remain down about 20% this year.
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