An 'industry behemoth.' Inside the federal government's efforts to break up Google

Google is at a pivotal point in its nearly 30-year history as it tries to fend off scrutiny over its practices.

Federal prosecutors have depicted the tech giant as an "industry behemoth" that has "corrupted legitimate competition" The government wants the judge to force Google to sell its Chrome browser and share data with rivals.

Google plans to appeal the ruling and has accused the Department of Justice of pushing a “radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans ’s global technology leadership”.

Google runs a popular web browser, email, navigation app, news aggregator, virtual assistant and productivity tools.

Today , Google ’s parent company Alphabet has a market capitalization of more than $2 trillion .

It has become an advertising powerhouse, leveraging the trove of valuable data it gathers from people who use Google 's products.

As Google became the dominant search engine, news publishers relinquished control to the tech giant to drive traffic to their websites.

As Google captured more online advertising dollars, publishers worried they weren't being compensated enough for their content.

A separate lawsuit filed by the DOJ accuses Google of monopolizing digital ad technologies and harming online publishers.