On Friday, the Ministry of Justice laid down its route map to break the advertising technology of Google, which would be the second request to force the sale of its affairs within a year.
The comments from the government came during a hearing that was convened by judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the American court for the eastern district of Virginia, who last month ruled that Google had a monopoly about some parts of a vast system that places advertisements on websites. She must now decide which measures, known as remedies, she must take to resolve her concerns.
A lawyer from the Ministry of Justice said that the government expected to force the court to force Google to differentiate tools used by online publishers to sell advertising space, as well as the technology that connects publishers with advertisers want to buy that space. In the original court case, the government had asked the court to force Google to sell advertising technology that it had acquired over the years.
To leave Google with “90 percent of the publishers that are required to them, it is honestly too dangerous,” said Julia Tarver Wood, the main lawyer of the government in the case.
Google's lawyers said that a collapse would not be in accordance with rather legal precedent and privacy and security protection.
The Ministry of Justice's request is the latest legal blow to Google, which is also in the middle of a second hearing about how the monopoly can be remedied while searching in a federal court in Washington. In that case, the government asked a judge to force the company to sell its popular browser, Chrome, together with other measures.
Combined, the two government requests – if granted – would probably represent the greatest reform of a powerful company by the federal government since the 1980s, when AT&T splits into several companies as part of an antitrust scheme at the Ministry of Justice.
It is still to be seen whether the jury members will force a collapse, seen among antitrust experts as the most extreme solution.
In the advertising business, which was submitted in 2023, government lawyers argued that Google had dominated the usually invisible technology that supplies advertisements on websites on the internet. That system carries out an auction for open advertising space on a website, such as a news publisher, in real time while the page is loading.
The government argued that Google had illegally monopolized three parts of that system: tools that websites used to post their open advertising space, tools used by advertisers to buy it and the software that connected the two sides of each transaction.
Judge Brinkema ruled last month that Google had broken the law to protect its monopoly compared to the tools of the publisher and the software that connects buyers with sellers of advertising space, known as an advertisement. The government has not proven that Google was a monopolist when it came to the tools used by advertisers, she added.
During Friday's hearing, Judge Brinkema said she would meet a hearing to determine the remedies in September.
In order to resolve his concerns, the Ministry of Justice said, it is planning to ask the court to force Google to sell his advertisement, which facilitates transactions between buyers and sellers of advertising space.
The government will also look for the disintegration of Google's advertising tools by turning off part of them that carries out auctions for advertising space, so that the underlying coding is open to the public. Later, the government wants Google to sell the tools that treat other functions for publishers, such as keeping records.
Google's main lawyer, Karen Dunn, said that the plan would not comply with the legal precedent. Even if the court were seriously considering breaking out Google's advertising technology activities, the government's proposal would be a challenge, she added.
Few buyers would exist for technology, and those who could afford it are “huge technology companies,” Mrs. Dunn added. Moreover, important security and privacy protection from Google would disappear.
“It is probably completely impossible, what they are talking about”, without causing serious problems, she said.
Instead, Google has proposed that the Court of the company demanded that the company changes or stores some of the practices that the government said it used to strengthen its power, and said that steps would take his advertisement auction system in a way that publishers would benefit.
