Lauren Feiner, reporting for The Verge:

The Department of Justice says that Google must divest the Chrome web browser to restore competition to the online search market, and it left the door open to requiring the company to spin out Android, too.

Filed late Wednesday in DC District Court, the initial proposed final judgment refines the DOJ’s earlier high-level outline of remedies after Judge Amit Mehta found Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search and search text advertising.

The filing includes a broad range of requirements the DOJ hopes the court will impose on Google — from restricting the company from entering certain kinds of agreements to more broadly breaking the company up. The DOJ’s latest proposal doubles down on its request to spin out Google’s Chrome browser, which the government views as a key access point for searching the web.

Other remedies the government is asking the court to impose include prohibiting Google from offering money or anything of value to third parties — including Apple and other phone-makers — to make Google’s search engine the default, or to discourage them from hosting search competitors. It also wants to ban Google from preferencing its search engine on any owned-and-operated platform (like YouTube or Gemini), mandate it let rivals access its search index at “marginal cost, and on an ongoing basis,” and require Google to syndicate its search results, ranking signals, and US-originated query data for 10 years. The DOJ is also asking that Google let websites opt out of its AI overviews without being penalized in search results.

I wrote in August that a breakup was unlikely, and I was correct, though only marginally. I don’t disagree with any of the other remedies the Justice Department proposes — no more search contracts, no more self-promotion, letting rivals access the Google search index, and letting websites opt out of Gemini-powered artificial intelligence search summaries — but divesting Chrome is ineffectual. Google Chrome was created as a convenient app to access Google Search; think of it as a Google app for the desktop. It invented the now-commonplace combined address bar and search field Omnibox to encourage Google searches and move the web away from typing in specific websites, and it worked. Now, every modern browser uses an Omnibox of sorts because it’s the best and most intuitive way to construct a web browser. Chrome has no value to anyone, including itself, because it makes no money by itself. Chrome has no ads or trackers separate from Google — it operates as a Google Search interface first and foremost because it was designed to be one.

Chrome is not at the heart of Google’s search monopoly, but it’s pointless to litigate that anymore because the government has already won the case: that Google has a search monopoly somehow and Chrome contributes to it. A good remedy for this is to simply force Google to decouple Google Search and Chrome and to prompt users to set a default search engine when they first install Chrome. I would even be fine with a search engine ballot of sorts showing up for existing users beginning January 2026 or something similar because the government won its case fair and square, and that seems like a great way to ask people to re-evaluate their relationship with an illegal monopoly. If Google really did unfairly construct its monopoly at the expense of competition — if users felt like they had no choice and the competition felt unfairly prevented by Google from flourishing — then a simple search engine ballot on Chrome and Android would address the problem. Every search engine above a certain monthly daily active user threshold would be allowed on the ballot, and users would choose their preferred option.

Chrome itself isn’t the problem. It’s partially an open-source project simply managed by Google because it funnels people into using Google Search unscrupulously. The financial benefit for Google — the reason it finances Chrome at all — is because Chrome is a giant advertising beacon meant to boost Google’s search engine, which, unlike Chrome, actually makes money. The Justice Department ignores entirely that Chrome itself and the Chromium browser engine aren’t profitable, easy to develop, or attractive to anyone. If Chrome Inc. became a real, publicly traded company tomorrow morning, it’d be bankrupt in hours because it would have to hire staff to manage the world’s most popular browser but wouldn’t have any ad tracking software or means of monetization. The monetization is made by Google for Google, and this makes Chrome an incredibly unattractive yet heavily expensive purchase for anyone.

So why would any other company buy Chrome for billions of dollars? To build a monopoly so it can get its money’s worth. If Microsoft bought it, it’d roll it into Edge and promote Bing; if Apple bought it, it’d make it macOS-exclusive to get people to buy Macs, especially in schools and offices; and if it spun out into its own company, it would become a monopoly with 80 percent market share overnight. If the primary purpose of the Justice Department’s game is to reduce the total number of monopolies operating in the United States, forcing a Chrome divestiture is the worst possible strategy. Whoever owns Chrome will become a monopoly overnight, and to subsidize the maintenance of that monopoly, the new Chrome Inc. or Chrome LLC would make its monopoly illegal and land itself in hot legal water again. Chrome by itself is a monopoly, and the only way to hurt Google is by forcing it to untie Google Search from Chrome. That isn’t done by forcing a divestiture. The only sensible owner of Chrome is Google because Google doesn’t need Chrome to survive.

Proponents of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department contend that at the heart of United States v. Google is not the ambition to make the search market more competitive but to inflict pain on Google. Although that’s a terrible strategy, divesting Google is less painful for Google than it is for Chrome itself. Again, Chrome can’t survive without some financial backing, and that financial backing directly results in an unlawful monopoly one way or the other. In other words, the Justice Department isn’t doing anything to further diversity in the search market — what the people voted for four years ago, though against a few weeks ago — but instead is harassing a private company for no other reason than the fact that it won in court. And the Justice Department did win in court — it’s indisputable. But it’s not doing any good with that win.

(An addendum: All of this isn’t even considering that uncoupling Chrome from Android — another one of the government’s key demands — is impossible. This ineffectual, lazy, useless Justice Department has been easily the biggest policy failure of the otherwise-successful Biden administration, and it won’t be remembered kindly in history for setting us up for a Trump autocracy.)