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Both are part of an elaborate Google ecosystem that keeps people using the company’s products.

“The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired,” the US government said in the filing. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”

Legal experts said that the request to force the sale of Chrome could be met with scepticism by Mehta, in part because the government’s attempted breakup of Microsoft in the 2000s was overturned by an appeals court.

“That’s going to be an uphill climb for the government,” said Doug Melamed, a visiting fellow at Stanford Law School who worked in the Justice Department’s antitrust division during the Microsoft case.

Google is set to file its own suggestions for fixing the search monopoly by December 20. Both sides can modify their requests before Mehta is expected to hear arguments on the remedies this spring. He is expected to rule by the end of the summer.

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“The DOJ continues to push a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president for regulatory affairs at Google, said in a statement this week after details of the government’s discussions were reported publicly.

The government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment.

Regulators have in recent years cracked down on the power of the biggest tech companies. The US Justice Department has also sued Google over its dominance in advertising technology, and Apple for making it difficult for consumers to leave its tightly-knit universe of devices and software. The Federal Trade Commission has separately sued Amazon and Meta, accusing them of anticompetitive behaviour and stifling rivals.

It is unclear if these efforts will continue under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. Some of the antitrust lawsuits began during his first administration.

The government’s victory in the Google search case followed a 10-week trial last year. Justice Department lawyers said Google had locked out rivals by signing deals with Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and others to be the default search engine that appears when users open a smartphone or a new tab in a web browser. In total, Google paid $US26.3 billion as part of those deals in 2021, according to evidence presented at the trial.

The government argued that those deals entrenched Google’s power, guaranteeing that its search traffic was robust. The company then used the data it gathered to make its search engine better, which kept customers coming back.

Google argued that its deals had not broken the law. It said users chose Google because it was better than search engines like Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo at finding information.

The states and the Justice Department were still deciding what to ask for, as the Wednesday deadline loomed, to file their request, according to three people familiar with the talks.

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The government also asked the judge to force Google to shed any stakes in artificial intelligence companies that control technology that could compete with search engines. Generative AI has emerged as the next big playing field in tech, and Google has already integrated its own AI into search results.

Google is an investor in Anthropic, an AI startup that makes a chatbot called Claude. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

Publishers and website owners should also have the ability to opt out of Google’s AI models using that content for training, the government said in its filing.

On Monday, a federal judge will hear closing arguments in the second major antitrust trial against Google – the one involving advertising technology – in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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