Federal judge gives DOJ deadline to decide Google antitrust penalty

The loose timeline outlined by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta came during his first court hearing since labeling Google a ruthless monopolist in a landmark ruling last month.

Mehta’s decision triggered another round of legal proceedings to determine how Google should be penalized for years of wrongdoing and forced to make other changes to prevent potential future abuses by the dominant search engine that sits at the basis of his internet empire.

Attorneys for the Justice Department and Google failed to reach a consensus on how the penalty phase timeframe should play out in the weeks leading up to Friday’s hearing in Washington DC, prompting Mehta to point the way they hope it will result. a decision on sentencing before Labor Day next year.

For that to happen, Mehta has indicated that he would like the penalty phase trial to take place next spring. The judge said March and April seem like the best months in his court calendar.

If Mehta’s timeline holds, a ruling on Google’s antitrust sanctions would come nearly five years after the Justice Department filed the lawsuit that led to a 10-week antitrust trial last fall. It’s similar to the timeline Microsoft experienced in the late 1990s, when regulators targeted it for its misconduct in the personal computer market.

The Justice Department has yet to give any indication of how severely Google should be punished. The most likely targets are the longstanding deals Google has struck with Apple, Samsung and other tech companies to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers.

In exchange for guaranteed search traffic, Google paid its partners more than $25 billion annually — the most money going to Apple for the prized position on the iPhone.

In a more drastic scenario, the Justice Department could try to force Google to divest parts of its business, including the Chrome web browser and the Android software that powers most of the world’s smartphones, because both also block search traffic.

In Friday’s hearing, Justice Department lawyers said they needed enough time to come up with a comprehensive proposal that would also consider how Google has begun to implement artificial intelligence in search results and how this technology could change the market.

Google’s lawyers told the judge they hoped the Justice Department would come up with a realistic list of sanctions that would address the issues in the judge’s ruling, rather than presenting extreme measures that amounted to “political pandering.”

Mehta gave the two sides until Sept. 13 to file a proposed timeline that includes the Justice Department disclosing the proposed sentence before 2025.