The Google situation may change dramatically in the near future Apparently, the US Department of Justice may ask a federal judge to force Google to sell part of its business, as reported by CBS News While it is still too early to make any kind of declaration about Google's future, if the company is forced to sell part of its business because it is too dominant, the situation in the tech industry as we know it could change forever

Not only could the Justice Department force Google to sell off part of its operations, but federal prosecutors also said they could ask a court to force the company to release the data it uses to run its popular search engine and AI products to competitors Google clearly has important secrets (the company is always ahead of the curve with consistent algorithm changes) that make its search engine work Revealing these would be a major change in the way search rankings work

Google also has very lucrative contracts with companies like Apple and Samsung, thereby keeping its search engine as the default choice and allowing it to further control the market Google currently has agreements with Samsung to share revenue from the Play Store and with Apple to share search traffic on Safari

The DOJ is not happy with these deals and could crush them It also wants to prevent Google from using its own products, such as Chrome, Google Play, and Android, to give it a competitive advantage in search and related services Whether this will be accomplished by forcing Google to sell a portion of its business or by restricting the ways in which Google can leverage other products remains to be seen

“For more than a decade, Google has dominated the most popular distribution channels, leaving rivals with little incentive to compete for users To fully remedy these losses, we not only need to end Google's domination of distribution today, we need to ensure that Google cannot dominate distribution tomorrow”

Leigh-Ann Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, said that in response to the filing, the DOJ “has already indicated a demand that goes far beyond the specific legal issues”

As you might expect, the Google representative cited “government overreach” and “unintended negative consequences for American innovation and American consumers” Whether this is overreach will be determined as more documents and information are submitted, but it is certainly something that everyone in the tech industry should be paying attention to

This is far from Google's first clash with the US government, with US District Judge Amit Mehta ruling in August that Google's search engine was illegally exploiting its dominance Between this ruling and the possibility that the Justice Department will ask a federal judge to require Google to divest some of its business, it appears that a battle lies ahead if the search giant wants to continue operating as it has