Google’s government foes are aiming too high

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Holiday wish lists are often ambitious. The federal government’s wish list for Google takes that to a whole new level.

The Justice Department’s proposed remedies to address anticompetitive behavior by the search giant were unveiled late Wednesday. Google was found to have engaged in such behavior in August by a federal judge, who called the 26-year-old company a “monopolist" that used illegal practices to maintain its dominance of the world’s search market. Some of the DOJ’s proposals were expected, such as the divestiture of the Chrome browser and a ban on payments to Apple in exchange for default or preferred placement of Google’s search engine on Apple’s devices.

But others came as a surprise, including a proposal the government described as “Restoring Competition Through Syndication And Data Access." This involves Google providing its search index—essentially the massive database it has about all sites on the web—to rivals and potential rivals at a “marginal cost." Google would also have to give those same parties full access to user data and advertising data at no charge for 10 years. That caught investors off guard. Shares of Google parent Alphabet—already under pressure over the past six months from worries about antitrust crackdowns—lost a further 4.7% on Thursday.

“We view these as the most egregious of the government’s requests, and even calls into question the objectivity of their analysis," Colin Sebastian of Robert W. Baird wrote of the syndication proposal in a note to clients. Mark Mahaney of Evercore ISI called the proposals “draconian" in his report Thursday.