The US Justice Department (DOJ) is reportedly looking to force Alphabet’s Google (GOOG, GOOGL) to divest from its Chrome browser as part of its ongoing antitrust case, according to a Bloomberg report. Former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chief technologist and the Abundance Institute head of AI policy Neil Chilson joins Market Domination to discuss his read on the ongoing antitrust lawsuit.
A federal judge ruled that Google maintained a monopoly on search through its traffic acquisition agreements, violating antitrust laws. The DOJ is reportedly asking the same judge to force Alphabet to sell Chrome.
Chilson tells Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton that he thinks the DOJ is “trying to anchor everybody to a position right now, given that there’s quite a lot of uncertainty going forward. The DOJ will be under… different leadership by the time [Judge Amit] Mehta decides this. So I think of this as more of a political move to leak these a trial balloon to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to be very aggressive in this space. What does everybody think about it?'”
The expert explains that “the best remedy,” in his view, would be to “address what the judge saw as a competitive problem, without having potentially unintended consequences for other parts of the market, would be to restrict the ability of Google to enter those types of contracts.”
“The problem here is that those contracts involve Google paying billions and billions of dollars to other companies, such as Apple (AAPL) and Mozilla… And one assumes that there’s a group of [companies] who would like to keep receiving that money from Google and have been trying to think of other remedies that we could get.”
Watch the video above for more from Chilson about the impact of the upcoming Trump administration on Alphabet’s antitrust woes.
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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.