Will Google Be Broken Up? What’s at Stake in the Coming Antitrust Ruling

Alphabet Inc.’s Google lost the biggest antitrust challenge it has confronted when a US judge in 2024 found that it illegally monopolized the search market. Now it’s facing the possibility that the result will be a forced breakup of the company.

The US government has said it wants Google to sell its Chrome web browser and license search data to competitors in what would mark the biggest forced breakup of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in 1984. US District Judge Amit Mehta is expected to issue a ruling soon with remedies to unwind Google’s monopoly. In anticipation of his decision, artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Perplexity expressed interest in acquiring Chrome, which together with the open-source Chromium software is the main way people access the web on PCs.