The U.S. Justice Department is debating what action to take against Google after a court ruled last week that the search engine giant has a monopoly on the search engine market.
Bloomberg and the New York Times report that some of the options being discussed within the agency include more extreme solutions: Google could be forced to ditch the Android mobile operating system and/or the Chrome browser.
The Justice Department believes that Android and Chrome contribute to Google’s dominance among search engines because Google is the default search engine on both products.
Other options that have been discussed include forcing Google to get rid of Google Ads, or allowing the company to license its data to competitors such as Microsoft Bing or DuckDuckGo.
According to figures from Statista published earlier this year, Google clearly dominates the search engine market. The search engine has a market share of over 91%, followed distantly by Microsoft subsidiary Bing with just over 3%.
Google was recently sued by the US Department of Justice, accusing it of trying to gain an illegal monopoly on the search engine market. A federal judge has now ruled on the case, The Verge reports, and Google won’t be happy with the outcome.
The judge ruled that Google had violated U.S. competition laws. “Google is a monopoly and has acted as such in order to maintain its monopoly,” the court order said. According to the court, Google has a monopoly on “general search services” and “general text advertising in search.”
Google said it would appeal the decision. “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we cannot make it easily accessible,” said Kent Walker, the company’s head of global affairs.
The next step is to determine what sanctions will be imposed on the search engine giant. In the worst case, Google could be forced to divest parts of its search engine services.
This article was originally published in our sister publication PC för Alla and has been translated and adapted from Swedish.
