DOJ’s staggering proposal would hurt consumers and America’s global technological leadership

As part of its lawsuit over how we distribute Search, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a staggering proposal that seeks dramatic changes to Google services.

DOJ had a chance to propose remedies related to the issue in this case: search distribution agreements with Apple, Mozilla, smartphone OEMs, and wireless carriers.

Instead, DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership. DOJ’s wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Court’s decision. It would break a range of Google products — even beyond Search — that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives.

This extreme proposal would:

• Endanger the security and privacy of millions of Americans, and undermine the quality of products people love, by forcing the sale of Chrome and potentially Android.
• Require disclosure to unknown foreign and domestic companies of not just Google’s innovations and results, but even more troublingly, Americans’ personal search queries.
• Chill our investment in artificial intelligence, perhaps the most important innovation of our time, where Google plays a leading role.
• Hurt innovative services, like Mozilla’s Firefox, whose businesses depend on charging Google for Search placement.
• Deliberately hobble people’s ability to access Google Search.
• Mandate government micromanagement of Google Search and other technologies by appointing a “Technical Committee” with enormous power over your online experience.

As just one example, DOJ’s proposal would literally require us to install not one but two separate choice screens before you could access Google Search on a Pixel phone you bought. And the design of those choice screens would have to be approved by the Technical Committee. And that’s just a small part of it. We wish we were making this up.

DOJ’s approach would result in unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers, and small businesses — and jeopardize America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment it’s needed most.

As the Court said, Google offers “the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.” We’re still at the early stages of a long process and many of these demands are clearly far afield from what even the Court’s order contemplated. We’ll file our own proposals next month, and will make our broader case next year.