The US Department of Justice has proposed the remedies to Judge Amit Mehta following his ruling in August, in which he declared that Google “is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly”.

The landmark competition case was brought by the DOJ and 11 state attorneys general four years ago, in the final months of the first Donald Trump administration.

In a statement today, Kent Walker, president of global affairs and chief legal officer at Google and Alphabet, accused the DOJ of pushing a “radical interventionist agenda” with a “wildly overbroad proposal”.

The DOJ’s 23-page submission to the Washington, D.C. court says that Google’s “ownership and control of Chrome and Android — key methods for the distribution of search engines to consumers — poses a significant challenge” for an effective remedy in the case.

It argues that Google “must divest Chrome”, while suggesting that “behavioural remedies” could be pursued in respect of the Android operating system, which powers nearly half of all smartphones.

If changes to Android fail to achieve their intended goals, the court could then order Google to divest Android as well, the DOJ said.

Google said the proposed remedies would “endanger the security and privacy of millions of Americans, and undermine the quality of products people love”, as well as introducing “government micromanagement of Google Search and other technologies”.

“DOJ’s approach would result in unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers, and small businesses — and jeopardize America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment it’s needed most,” Mr Walker said.

“As the Court said, Google offers ‘the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users’. We’re still at the early stages of a long process and many of these demands are clearly far afield from what even the court’s order contemplated.

“We’ll file our own proposals next month, and will make our broader case next year.”