(Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Justice is considering options that include breaking up Alphabet’s Google, a week after a judge ruled the tech giant illegally monopolized the online search market, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.
Shares of the California-based company were down 1.4% in extended trading.
The verdict, delivered last week, held that Google violated antitrust law, spending billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly and become the world’s default search engine. The ruling is seen as the first big win for federal authorities taking on the market dominance of Big Tech.
The DOJ’s other options include forcing Google to share data with competitors and instating measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Divesting the Android operating system was one of the remedies most frequently discussed by justice department attorneys, the report said.
Officials were also considering trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, Google’s search ad program, and a possible divestment of its Chrome web browser, according to the report.
Federal antitrust regulators have sued Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Apple in the past four years, claiming the companies illegally maintained monopolies.
Microsoft had settled with the DOJ in 2004 on claims it forced its Internet Explorer Web browser on Windows users.
Alphabet and the DOJ did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)
