Federal judge sets deadline for Justice Department to decide on antitrust fine against Google

The vague timeline outlined by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta came in the court’s first hearing since he branded Google a ruthless monopolist in a landmark ruling last month.

Mehta’s decision prompted another phase of the legal process to determine how Google should be punished for years of misconduct and to force the company to make further changes to prevent possible future abuses by the dominant search engine that forms the foundation of its internet empire.

Attorneys for the Justice Department and Google were unable to agree on a timeline for the sentencing phase in the weeks leading up to Friday’s hearing in Washington, D.C., so Mehta urged them to pursue a path that he hopes will lead to a sentencing decision before Labor Day next year.

To achieve this, Mehta indicated he would like to hold the sentencing trial next spring. The judge said March and April are the best months in his court calendar.

If Mehta’s timeline works out, a ruling on Google’s antitrust penalties would come nearly five years after the Justice Department filed suit that led to a 10-week antitrust trial last fall. That’s comparable to the time Microsoft went through in the late 1990s when regulators targeted the company for its misconduct in the PC market.

The Justice Department has not yet given any indication of how severely Google will be punished. The most likely penalty is the long-term agreements Google has with Apple, Samsung and other technology companies to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and in web browsers.

In return for guaranteed search traffic, Google pays its partners more than $25 billion annually – with most of that money going to Apple for the coveted position on the iPhone.

In a more drastic scenario, the Justice Department could try to force Google to give up parts of its business, including the Chrome web browser and the Android software that runs on most of the world’s smartphones, because those two programs also block search traffic.

At Friday’s hearing, Justice Department lawyers said they need sufficient time to develop a comprehensive proposal that will take into account the fact that Google has begun using artificial intelligence in its search results and how that technology could disrupt the market.

Google’s lawyers told the judge they hoped the Justice Department would propose a realistic list of penalties that would address the issues raised in the judge’s decision, rather than taking extreme measures that amounted to “political sensationalism.”

Mehta gave both sides a Sept. 13 deadline to propose a timeline that would require the Justice Department to announce its proposed sentence before 2025.