Will Google’s Antitrust Battle Lead to Real Change?
Technology Policy | By: Mindy Spatt | August 26, 2024
Featured Photo: www.reuters.com
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Google’s stranglehold over Internet searches is undeniable and starts for most consumers by purchasing a phone, tablet, or computer that has Google pre-installed. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia recently ruled that this arrangement and others like it have allowed Google to create an illegal monopoly, paving the way for potential remedies ranging from a breakup of the company to changes in some of its most lucrative business practices. That’s assuming that Google’s appeal, which could take years, isn’t successful.
Analysis
The Department of Justice (DOJ) along with the state Attorneys General of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas sued Google in 2020; later, a group of 35 states, along with Guam, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, filed a similar suit that was tried at the same time as the original Justice Department allegations.
In a press release, Bill Barr, the US Attorney General at the time, said the suit “…strikes at the heart of Google’s grip over the internet for millions of American consumers, advertisers, small businesses and entrepreneurs beholden to an unlawful monopolist.” At that time, Google’s market value was $1 trillion (it is now $2 trillion), and it accounted for almost 90 percent of all search queries. This dominance, alleged the DOJ, was won by employing tactics including exclusionary agreements requiring that Google be the preset default search engine on billions of mobile devices and computers worldwide, prohibiting preinstallation of a competitor and making Google undeletable.
Google’s exclusive contracts proved to be an obstacle for search engine upstart DuckDuckGo in seeking the default search engine agreements for its private search service. DuckDuckGo’s CEO Gabriel Weinberg testified in the case, saying that Google’s default deals with browsers and other platforms prevented DuckDuckGo from effectively competing in the search engine market.
Judge Amit Mehta agreed with Weinberg that Google had monopolized the search field, saying “Time and again, Google’s partners have concluded that it is financially infeasible to switch default General Search Engines or seek greater flexibility in search offerings because it would mean sacrificing the hundreds of millions if not billions, of dollars that Google pays them as revenue share. These are Fortune 500 companies,” he added, “and they have nowhere else to turn other than Google.”
In the wake of the decision, Bloomberg, the NY Times, the Guardian, and CNBC all ran stories headlining the possibility that the court would order a breakup of the companies, but most commentators have said that outcome is unlikely.
Asheesh Agarwal, a former DOJ and Federal Trade Commission official, predicts that “the court is likely to order a somewhat narrow remedy that leaves Google’s business model in place. [It] could simply forbid Google from signing longer-term exclusive contracts with distributors or paying its business partners to set Google’s search engine as the default.”
Weinberg of Duck Duck Go has called for the exclusive agreements to be banned, but that would not guarantee that his service or other competitors could snag more of the market. Google argued that its dominance was due to the superiority of its product, and Mehta noted in his decision that “Google is widely recognized as the best (general search engine) available in the United States.”
A sell-off of a non-search engine asset is possible. If Google were ordered to divest a small part of its company, its Chrome browser or its Android mobile operating system, for example, those products might be prevented from favoring Google.
Another potential remedy under consideration is to require devices and browsers to ask consumers to choose a search engine when they first set up their devices. Bill Echikson a Senior Fellow for the Center for European Policy Analysis’s Digital Innovation Initiative, points out that “Europe ordered such a change in 2020, implementing a choice screen for Android devices. It failed to dent Google’s dominance in Europe… which has remained above 95 percent.”
For his next step, Judge Mehta has ordered the parties to submit a proposed schedule for the remedies stage of the proceeding, which will be a separate trial to address fixes for the antitrust violations he found. Between that and Google’s appeal the impacts of the decision are likely many years away.
Engagement Resources:
- Mathew Ingram, The Google Antitrust Decision Could Dramatically Change the Internet. Or not. Aug. 8, 2024; https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today
- Sumit Sharma, The DOJ’s Google Search Case – What Next?, Aug.16, 2024; https://www.techpolicy.press/the-dojs-google-search-case-what-next/
- Bill Echikson, Google Antitrust: Clear Verdict, Unclear Outcome, Aug. 14, 2024; https://cepa.org/article/google-antitrust-clear-verdict-unclear-outcome/
- 5 Things to Know About US v. Google by Asheesh Agarwal, Aug. 14, 2024; https://thehill.com/opinion/4826994-google-antitrust-case-impact/
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