Dive Brief:

• The Trump administration is pushing for the breakup of Alphabet’s Google, advancing a position that was taken by the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden as part of a major antitrust case.
• In a Friday court filing, DOJ said it was reaffirming its stance that Google must divest its Chrome browser in the interest of competition.
• The proposed divestiture would “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet,” the department said.

Dive Insight:

In August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google has operated its dominant search engine and signed distribution deals in an anticompetitive manner. Google has said it plans to appeal the decision.

Last fall, DOJ filed an initial proposed final judgment that called for several changes at Google, including a Chrome divestiture. In its Friday filing, the department said it was maintaining “the core components of the initial proposal.”

“DOJ’s sweeping proposals continue to go miles beyond the Court’s decision, and would harm America’s consumers, economy and national security,” Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels said in an email.

The case is part of a trend of aggressive U.S. antitrust enforcement against big tech companies in recent years, starting in the first Trump administration and accelerating under Biden.

“The new administration has sent a strong signal that, when appropriate, breakups are on the table,” Wyatt Fore, a partner at law firm Shinder Cantor Lerner, said in an email. 

The move comes despite a recent Bloomberg report saying Google was urging DOJ officials to back away from the push to break up the company. 

In an October interview before the Economic Club of Chicago, then-presidential candidate Trump refused to say whether his administration would favor breaking up Google, citing concerns about how such a policy might impact America’s ability to compete on the international stage with countries like China. But he did make clear that he was “not a fan” of Google, saying “they treat me badly.”

In one significant shift, DOJ said Friday that it was no longer seeking the mandatory divestiture of Google’s artificial intelligence investments in favor of a prior notification for any future ones.

DOJ’s reversal on that front could mean the administration wants to avoid being heavy-handed in its treatment of AI, particularly with the rise of foreign tech startups like DeepSeek, according to Fore.

“Given that the artificial intelligence sector is still developing, the government is probably more inclined to take a wait-and-see approach to see how the industry evolves,” he said.

The litigation dates back to late 2020 when the first Trump administration and several states sued Google alleging that it had violated the Sherman Act by holding monopolies in the search and search advertising markets.

Meanwhile, in a separate antitrust case against the tech giant, brought under Biden, DOJ claims the company has used strategic acquisitions to buy its way into dominance of the ad-tech space.