This piece originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.
The United States government’s case against Google is the first significant antitrust victory against a major technology company since the late 1990s, and could mark the start of a disruptive period for Big Tech. Some of the current cases against leading American technology firms began under the first Trump administration, with others launched by Biden administration enforcers, but all so far are being sustained by President Trump’s picks to head the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ).
The DOJ antitrust case against Google is in the end game: a remedies trial that will determine the consequences of DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta’s August 2024 ruling that Google’s conduct violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act by monopolizing the market for general search. Judge Mehta singled out the firm’s use of exclusive agreements that granted Google Search default status on web browsers. While both parties have filed briefs on remedies that would address this practice, the DOJ’s proposal goes much further, calling for Google’s divestiture of Chrome, restriction from acquisitions related to “querying” or other search products, and a requirement to open its search index and data corpus to competitors. To stay within the intended goal of remedies, namely to return competition to the market for general search services, Judge Mehta should consider proposals for default agreements and data syndication.
How it started, how it’s going
Judge Mehta’s ruling outlines how Google’s monopoly on search was created through the combination of best-in-class technology and anticompetitive conduct. The ruling notes that Google’s general search product has been a market leader for nearly two decades. The story goes that Google beat out and maintained its lead against competitors such as Yahoo, Microsoft, DuckDuckGo, and others because of its superior method of indexing and ranking web pages to return the best response to an individual’s query. This, bolstered by $292.1 billion in capital expenditures since 2005, with large percentages directed toward infrastructure that serves its search and cloud businesses, turned Google into the world’s go-to answer machine.
