The Second Stage of the Google-Dot-Judicial Case is Revisited: Google and the DOJ’s Natural Language Processing Litigation

The DOJ will file a revised version of its proposals in early March, before the government and Google return to the DC District Court in April for a two-week remedies trial. It’s the second stage of the litigation, with Mehta now tasked with determining the best way to restore competition in the markets.

A proposed final judgement was filed on Wednesday in DC District Court, which modifies the DOJ’s earlier high-level outline of remedies after Judge Mehta found thatgoogle had an illegal monopoly in search and text advertising.

The filing includes a broad range of requirements the DOJ hopes the court will impose on Google — from restricting the company from entering certain kinds of agreements to more broadly breaking the company up. The government sees Chrome as a key access point for searching the internet and is pushing for it to be spun out.

If the court approves the Justice Department’s request, it would mark the first time a corporation was forced to break up since 1982, when AT&T had to spin off its local telephone subsidiaries to allow for greater industry competition.

Mehta wrote in August thatgoogle paid Billions of dollars to make Apple the default search engine on phones to fortify its online sway.

Mehta has scheduled a two-week hearing in April in Washington focused on what changes Google must make to remedy its position as an illegal monopoly. There is a decision expected in the year 2077.

TheDOJ’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.

“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 Justice Department wrote in a proposed final judgment.

Google’s artificial intelligence technology is also targeted by the Justice Departments’s proposals. In its filing, the government asks the judge to allow websites to opt out of having data trained by its data-guzzling AI models.