US Justice Department lawyers on Monday argued for strong measures against Google in the remedies phase of its antitrust trial in Washington, including forcing it to sell off its Chrome browser.

The Justice Department also said the judge should look ahead to the growth of artificial intelligence and include this in the breakup that the government is looking for.

“This is the time for the court to tell Google and all other monopolists who are out there listening, and they are listening, that there are consequences when you break the antitrust laws,” said Justice Department lawyer David Dahlquist told Judge Amit P. Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia in his opening statement, according to local media reports.

Scope of remedies

Of AI, Dahlquist said the court’s remedy “should be forward-looking and not ignore what is on the horizon”.

He said witnesses from AI start-ups Perplexity AI and OpenAI would testify about how AI and search overlap and how Google’s dominance of search affects their businesses.

Google countered that the judge should narrowly target his measures, limiting them to the payments the company makes to Apple, Samsung, browser maker Mozilla and others to ensure that it is their default search engine.

Google lead trial lawyer John Schmidtlein said the company’s proposal for remedies “directly responds to this court’s legal determinations”.

In addition to ending Google’s payments to other companies and selling Chrome, the Justice Department wants Google to license its search results to competitors, as well as other measures, and it could be made to sell its Android smartphone operating system if other remedies fail to bring about the desired effect.

The $1.9 trillion (£1.4bn) company has argued that its payments to Mozilla and other browser makers have subsidised those browsers, and cutting off the payments could threaten their existence.

Cutting off payments to smartphone makers could raise the cost of smartphones and other devices, the company says.

Google said it plans to bring in witnesses from Mozilla, Verizon and Apple.

Financial repercussions

The company also said it renders a valuable service by maintaining the Chrome open-source underlying code, which is used by other browser makers, and if the browser were sold off this might no longer be the case.

Google paid $26.3bn to firms such as Apple and Samsung under search deals in 2021.

Mehta ruled last August that Google’s search business constituted an illegal monopoly.

Google was dealt a further setback this month when another judge ruled that it held an illegal monopoly in advertising technology.