US regulators seek Chrome sale to end Google search monopoly

The US Department of Justice has proposed a far-reaching overhaul of Google's structure and business practices, including the sale of its Chrome browser, in an attempt to end its monopoly on internet search.

- Dan Milmo

The DoJ proposals follow a court case in August in which a federal judge ruled that Google maintained an illegal monopoly over search services.

The proposals, filed to a federal court in Washington, include the forced sale of the Chrome browser and a five-year ban from entering the browser market, a block on paying third parties such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products, and divestment of the Android mobile operating system if the initial proposals do not work.

The DoJ also said Google should give publishers and content creators the ability to block their data from being used to train its artificial intelligence models.

It wants Google's search index, a database of all the webpages it has crawled, to be available to rivals, along with search results.

The proposals will be considered by the same judge who presided over the Google ruling, Amit Mehta, who will decide next year which remedies to impose.