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Alphabet (GOOGL, GOOG)

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has asked that Google be forced to sell off its Chrome browser, as part of proposed remedies aimed at ending the company's monopoly in internet search.

These proposals were filed with a US federal court late on Wednesday and also asked for a divestment of Google's Android operating system, or a contingent Android divestment based on the effectiveness of other conduct-based remedies.

DOJ prosecutors also called for Google to divest within six months any investment or ownership in rival query-based artificial intelligence products, as well as rival advertising technology products and search distributors.

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This filing came after a judge ruled in favour of prosecutors in a landmark trial in August, who argued that that Google ran its search engine empire as an illegal monopoly.

Google said in a statement on Thursday that the "DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership" and that its proposal "goes miles beyond the court’s decision".

In terms of next steps, District of Columbia district court judge Amit Mehta, who sided with the DOJ’s monopoly argument, will now decide what should happen next in a separate "remedies" phase of the trial that will likely start in 2025.

Shares in Google's parent company Alphabet closed Thursday's session 4.5% in the red and were muted in pre-market trading on Friday morning.

Reddit (RDDT)

Shares in social media platform Reddit were down 7% in pre-market trading on Friday, following a report that one of its biggest shareholders plans to borrow against their stake.

Bloomberg reported that Advance Magazine Publishers, which is part of the Newhouse family's publishing empire and owns Condé Nast, is looking to establish a credit facility using an equity stake valued at as much as $1.2bn (£957m).

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A year after Reddit was founded in 2005, its founders sold the company to Condé Nast and Advance Publications then spun off the business to become an independent subsidiary in 2011.

Advance Publications reportedly made a windfall of nearly $2bn when Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March.

The fall in shares in after hours trading, came after the stock surged 16% in Thursday's session. This followed Reddit saying that it had rolled out a fix for an outage that affected thousands of US users, according to Reuters.