((Automatic translation by Reuters, please see disclaimer https://bit.ly/rtrsauto))
(Adding details of the ruling) by Jody Godoy
The United States said in a court filing on Tuesday that it plans to ask a judge to force Alphabet’s GOOGL.O Google to divest parts of its business that have helped the Big Tech company maintain an illegal monopoly on the search bar.
Prosecutors said such actions were among the potential remedies they could propose in the landmark case that could change the way Americans find information on the Internet after a judge ruled that Google, which handles 90% of Internet searches in the United States, had established an illegal monopoly. .
The Ministry of Justice is expected to submit a more detailed proposal to the court by November 20. Google will have the opportunity to offer its own solutions by December 20 at the latest.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington is a significant victory for competition authorities, who have brought a series of ambitious cases against Big Tech companies over the past four years.
Google said it planned to appeal and that its search engine had won over users thanks to its quality. Google said it faced strong competition from Amazon AMZN.O and other sites where users go directly to search for goods or services, and that users could choose other default search engines.
Some Google rivals have called for a split.
Yelp review site YELP.N, which sued Google over search in August, says splitting the Chrome browser and Google’s artificial intelligence services should be on the agenda. Yelp also wants Google to be prohibited from giving preference to its own local business pages, which compete with Yelp, in search results.
Adam Epstein, president and co-CEO of search advertising company adMarketplace, said the threat to order Google to sell parts of its business could be used to implement less drastic measures.
“Google will have no incentive to comply with the law if it doesn’t have the sword of Damocles hanging over it,” he said.
DuckDuckGo, a competing search engine, asked the Court to require Google to license its search results to its competitors, who could then create and improve their own products.
Microsoft MSFT.O, which runs rival search engine Bing, and Apple AAPL.O, which receives billions of dollars from Google each year, declined to comment.