US Department of Justice Reviews Forced Divestiture of Google Android, Chrome, and Advertising

Discussion on Advertising Platform and Data Sharing Plans
Largest Since 1984 AT&T if Split

The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly considering forcing Google to divest key businesses to prevent its monopoly in the search market, Bloomberg reported on the 13th (local time).

According to multiple sources, the potential divestiture targets include the Android operating system (OS), the Chrome web browser, and the advertising platform AdWords.

At the same time, less severe sanctions are also being considered. Instead of divestiture, measures such as allowing AdWords to operate smoothly on other search engines, sharing or licensing search data with competitors like Microsoft (MS), are being discussed. Additionally, there is talk of prohibiting the use of data collected from Google websites for artificial intelligence (AI) development.

If the U.S. Department of Justice proceeds with forcing Google to divest, it would be the first case of pursuing corporate breakup due to monopoly since the attempted breakup of MS over 20 years ago. Earlier, the U.S. government also split telecommunications company AT&T into eight companies in 1984 due to its monopoly in the wired telephone business.

This divestiture consideration follows a ruling by the Washington D.C. federal court on the 5th that Google violated antitrust laws by paying to set its own search engine as the default on smartphone web browsers. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2020, alleging that Google violated antitrust laws to secure dominance in the U.S. search engine market.

During the lawsuit, it was revealed that Google paid hundreds of billions of dollars to major smartphone manufacturers, including $20 billion (about 27 trillion won) to Apple in 2022, to have its applications set as the default search engine. Based on this, Google has maintained a dominant market share of about 90% and generated massive search advertising revenue. Two-thirds of Google's total revenue comes from search advertising, which exceeded $100 billion (about 136 trillion won) as of 2020.

The court ordered the Department of Justice to consider measures such as breakup to restore competition in the search market and instructed Google to cooperate.

Meanwhile, on the New York Stock Exchange that day, Alphabet's stock price closed up by over 1% compared to the previous trading day but showed a downward trend in after-hours trading.