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On August 13, Eastern Time, foreign media quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that as a U.S. court ruled last week that Google's search business violated U.S. antitrust laws, the U.S. Department of Justice is considering a rare measure to split Google. This move will be the first time the U.S. government has considered splitting a company on the grounds of illegal monopoly since the failed effort to split Microsoft 24 years ago. People familiar with the matter also said that if the U.S. Department of Justice pushes forward with its plan to split Google, the most likely departments to be divested will be the Android operating system and its web browser Chrome. One of the people familiar with the matter also said that the U.S. Department of Justice is also considering forcing Google to sell its platform AdWords for selling text ads.

Influenced by the above news, Google's parent company Alphabet's U.S. stock fell 2.5% after the market closed on Tuesday, but then recovered some of its losses and fell 0.9% as of press time. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on possible remedies, and a U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson also declined to comment.

It is reported that the discussion is still in the early stages. Amit P. Mehta, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has asked the U.S. Department of Justice and Google to propose a procedure to determine the solution of the case by September 4. Mehta has scheduled a hearing on September 6 to discuss the next steps.

The Justice Department's discussion of Google's dominance intensified after a judge ruled on August 5 that Google illegally monopolized the online search and search advertising markets. Google said it would appeal the ruling, but Mehta has ordered both parties to begin planning for the second phase of the case, which will involve the government's proposals to restore competition, including a possible breakup request.

Foreign media reported that if Google is eventually forced to split, it will be the largest U.S. corporate split since AT&T in the 1980s.

People familiar with the matter also said that divesting the Android operating system used on about 2.5 billion devices worldwide is the most discussed option by U.S. Department of Justice lawyers. It is reported that Google paid up to $26 billion to various companies to make its search engine the default setting for devices and web browsers, including $20 billion to Apple.

The court ruling could completely reshape Google's core business, which has grown into a $2 trillion Internet giant through online advertising and other businesses based on its search engine, or require it to abandon practices that have long cemented its dominance.

In addition, before the judge ruled that Google violated antitrust laws, a California jury ruled in December last year that Google had a monopoly on the distribution of Android applications. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in a statement this week that Google should not be allowed to "profit from an illegal monopoly." Data shows that last year alone, Google earned as much as $175 billion in revenue from search engines and related businesses.

The ruling showed that Google has a monopoly on ads that appear at the top of search results pages, known as "search text ads," and are used to attract users to websites. These ads are sold through Google Ads, which was renamed AdWords in 2018 and provides marketers with a way to advertise on certain search keywords related to their business. Testimony at last year's trial showed that about two-thirds of Google's total revenue came from search ads, which exceeded $100 billion by 2020.

One of the people familiar with the matter told foreign media that the US Department of Justice is also considering forcing Google to sell its Ad-Words platform for selling text ads. Even if the US Department of Justice does not require Google to sell AdWords, it may require "interoperability" to make it run seamlessly with other search engines.

Another option explored by Justice Department officials is to require Google to divest or license its data to competitors, such as Microsoft's Bing or Duck-DuckGo. The ruling showed that Google's contracts not only ensured that its search engine received the most user data (16 times that of the second-ranked competitor), but that these data flows also prevented its competitors from improving their search results and competing effectively.

Europe's recently enacted digital "gatekeeper" rules also made similar demands, requiring Google to provide some data to third-party search engines. Google has publicly stated that sharing data may raise privacy concerns among users, so it only provides search information that meets a certain threshold.

In previous cases, requiring a monopolist to allow competitors to obtain some technology was a remedy. In the first case brought by the Department of Justice against AT&T in 1956, the company was required to provide a royalty-free license for its patents. In 2000, a federal judge ruled against Microsoft in an antitrust case, and Microsoft was once in danger of "breaking up". The company eventually paid a settlement fee of up to $1.8 billion, was prohibited from participating in exclusive transactions that could harm competitors, and was required to open some source code.

It should be pointed out that the antitrust ruling on Google is itself a landmark antitrust ruling, which has raised serious questions about the power of technology giants in the era of the modern Internet. And not just Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta are also facing antitrust lawsuits.

Beijing Business Daily Comprehensive Report