Google will have to break up its business, the Justice Department said in a filing, upholding the previous administration's proposal after a federal judge ruled last year that the company illegally abused a monopoly over the search industry. As The Washington Post and The New York Times have reported, the Justice Department reiterated in a new filing that Google will have to sell the Chrome browser. When the DOJ argued for its sale last year, it said that selling Chrome "will permanently stop Google's control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet." The Justice Department also kept a Biden-era proposal that seeks to ban Google from paying companies like Apple, other smartphone manufacturers and Mozilla to make its search engine the default on their phones and browsers. It did remove a previous proposal that would compel Google to sell its stakes in AI startups, however, after Anthropic told the government that it needs the company's money to continue operating. Instead of banning AI investments altogether, the government wants to require the company to notify federal and state officials before making investments in artificial intelligence.

The US Department of Justice wants Google to sell off its Chrome browser as part of its final remedy proposal in a landmark antitrust case. The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must "promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve." It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine. The DOJ also demands that Google provide prior notification of any new joint venture, collaboration, or partnership with any company that competes with Google in search or in search text ads. However, the company no longer has to divest its artificial intelligence investments, which was part of an initial set of recommendations issued by the plaintiffs last November.

Part of the reason Google decided to start developing its own Chrome browser--all the way back in 2008--was to funnel people toward all of its web apps, from Google Docs to Gmail to Google Maps. And of course, Chrome has Google's search engine built right in. However, if you love Google Chrome but you've decided you've had enough of Google search, you can change the default search engine in the browser. You can switch to Bing, DuckDuckGo, or whichever alternative search engine you like. Maybe you feel you've spent enough of your life scrolling through Google's sponsored links, or perhaps you'd rather use a search engine without any AI in it.

Microsoft has been pushing Bing pop-up ads in Chrome on Windows 10 and 11. Windows Latest and The Verge reported on Friday that the ad encourages Chrome users (in bold lettering) to use Bing instead of Google search. Get hundreds of daily chat turns with Bing Al", the ad reads. If you click "Yes," the pop-up will install the "Bing Search" Chrome extension while making Microsoft's search engine the default. If you click "Yes" on the ad to switch to Bing, a Chrome pop-up will appear, asking you to confirm that you want to change the browser's default search engine. "Did you mean to change your search provider?" the pop-up asks. "The'Microsoft Bing Search for Chrome' extension changed search to use bing.com,'" Directly beneath that alert, seemingly in anticipation of Chrome's pop-up, another Windows notification warns, "Wait -- don't change it back!

In the ongoing court battle between Google and the U.S. Justice Department over whether the company has violated an antitrust law, the stakes are high. The outcome of the 10-week trial, which will be decided by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, could fundamentally change the way people search the internet and reduce revenue for the company that has the most common search engine for online users. The civil antitrust lawsuit is the first to go to trial in a series of cases targeting other big tech companies like Meta and Amazon. But this particular suit, brought forward by the Justice Department and eleven other states, alleges that Google illegally monopolizes search engine services--spending billions to do so-- making it the default company through which advertising companies and website publishers purchase and sell ads. "The question is whether [Google] is entrenching its monopoly and closing off avenues for competitors to try to develop a competitive search engine," says Eleanor Fox, professor at New York University School of Law.

A landmark trial currently under way in Washington may well decide the future of the internet. In the dock is Google, the world's largest search engine. The United States Department of Justice has accused the search giant of muscling its way to dominance by paying other companies like Apple to be the default search engine on their devices. "Google pays billions of dollars each year to distributors -- including popular-device manufacturers such as Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung … to secure default status for its general search engine," the Justice Department's complaint says. This, the DOJ thinks, chokes off competition that includes other search engines like Microsoft's Bing, and privately held DuckDuckGo.

Google went into a "panic" after Samsung, the world's second-largest manufacturer of smartphones and a user of the company's Android operating system, said it was considering offering Bing as the default search engine for users, according to a report published by the New York Times on Sunday. The tech giant is scrambling to catch up to rivals Microsoft in the adoption of A.I. services. The threat to Google's $162 billion business is reportedly pushing the company to revamp its search products, including creating an entirely new A.I.-powered search engine. Google's drive to compete contrasts with comments from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in an interview, also aired on Sunday, in which he suggested that he wanted to avoid a rush to release new A.I. products for fear of how they might affect society. In the interview with CBS's 60 Minutes, Alphabet CEO Pichai called artificial intelligence "the most profound technology humanity is working on," adding that it was "more profound than fire or electricity or anything that we've done in the past."

The AI wars are heating up. Smelling blood in the water, Microsoft has been working tirelessly to bake ChatGPT AI models into virtually all of its products. So far, the most prolific example of that has been Bing Chat. Bing Chat is a new section on Microsoft's oft-derided number 2 search engine that allows users to search with natural human language, and receive natural human language results in return. Powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, Bing has exclusive rights to commercial use of the machine learning models from the firm, prompting a furor of panic at search leader Google.

Back in the 1990s, the search engine category was a hot space. Yahoo, Netscape, AOL, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, Google search, MSN and others were vying to capture the dominant position. With time, they all fizzled out. Post 2000 was the era of Google Search, the undisputed winner of the space until quite recently. The tide is turning and the crown of Google Search is under threat.

Apple stands to lose up to $15 billion a year if the Justice Department forces Google to stop paying the company to be the default search engine on all iPhones - as regulators question the legality of the longtime arrangement. Anytime iPhone users open a web browser to enter a search query, it always defaults to Google. Even though anyone can change this setting, almost no one does, resulting in a huge amount of traffic (and ad revenue) to Google from over a billion iPhone users worldwide. Analysts from Bernstein estimated that Google's payment to Apple would increase to $15 billion in 2021 and as high as $18-$20 billion this year, reports 9to5Mac. The contracts are the basis of the DOJ's antitrust against the California-based company, which began in the closing days of the Trump administration and won't head to trial until sometime in 2023 Last year, Apple's total gross profit was over $152 billion - so losing the Google payments would shave at least 10% off.