If Google had hoped a bit of cosying up to President Trump would soften the US government's breakup demands in the wake of its search antitrust conviction, then is was seemingly mistaken.
The Trump Department of Justice filed a revised proposed final judgment [PDF] in Washington, D.C. District Court on Friday. This made most of the same demands put forward by Biden's DoJ in November after the election but prior to Trump taking office.
Pivotal to the demands issued by the DoJ in both the initial and revised proposed final judgment is that Google, having been found guilty of maintaining a monopoly in both general search services and text advertising, must be forced to sell off its Chrome browser. According to the DoJ, divestiture of Chrome would "provide an opportunity for a new rival to operate a significant gateway to search the internet, free of Google's monopoly control."
"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 argued, signaling a likelihood that it will continue to go hard against tech companies it perceives as having too much influence.
"Monopolies are incompatible with free markets and freedom more generally," the department added in its filing.
Much of the revised judgment proposal is identical to the Biden DoJ's initial proposal, with a few notable exceptions. Instead of forcing Google to sell off its AI investments, the new proposal instead seeks mandatory prior notification of future AI acquisitions. The option for Google to immediately divest Android is gone as well, in favor of proposing a forced divestiture of the mobile OS if Google fails to honor the agreement.
Changes were also proposed to a portion of the agreement forcing Google to syndicate its search text ads to competitors, with marginal cost pricing removed in favor of added parity and transparency controls.
Aside from those modifications, along with some changes "to resolve ambiguities," most of the new proposal remains the same.
If Trump's DoJ has its way, Google will still be forced to share ads and search results data for a decade at no cost to competitors to remedy the fact that it "has accumulated a tremendous amount of data over many years at the expense of its rivals." It must allow advertisers to export ad data without limitations too, and is barred from offering "anything of value for any form of default, placement or preinstallation" of its search service on devices manufactured by Apple or other companies. Prohibitions against self-preferencing remain in place.
"DoJ's sweeping proposals continue to go miles beyond the Court's decision, and would harm America's consumers, economy, and national security," a Google spokesperson told The Register, while pointing us to a December blog post outlining its own proposal for remedies.
Those remedies, refiled [PDF] without changes last week following the DoJ's filing on Friday, haven't impressed the department, which called Google's request nothing but a preservation of the status quo.
Google's proposal contains "only modest changes to its distribution contracts with Apple, carriers, OEMs and third-party distributors," the DoJ said. "Google's proposal falls woefully short of restoring competition to markets that have been harmed by Google's unlawfully entrenched monopolies and is inconsistent with remedies caselaw." ®