Anika Begay
Google’s arch-rivals Yelp and DuckDuckGo scored a huge victory Monday when a federal judge ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly. But their comments about the ruling were reserved. That’s because the work of restoring competition has just begun, and the judge has yet to decide what that work will include. With so many options on the table, Google’s competitors are pushing for changes they believe will help their businesses, which may be harder than it seems.
“While we are encouraged by the decision, it is critical that we find an effective resolution,” Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote in a blog post after the ruling, referring to the new phase of the trial that will begin in September.
“We’ve passed a major milestone, but there’s still a lot of history to be written,” Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s senior vice president of public affairs, said in a statement. “Google will do everything it can to hinder progress, which is why we hope to see a robust remediation process that can really dig into all the details, come up with a set of remedies that will actually work, and establish an oversight body to administer them.”
These statements reflect an awareness that Judge Amit Mehta’s decision on how to restore competition will be as important, if not more so, than his finding that Google violated antitrust law. The recently concluded liability phase found that Google violated the Sherman Act by cutting exclusionary contracts with phone and browser makers to maintain its default position as the search engine. In the remedies phase, Mehta will decide how to restore competition in general search and search text advertising. But a weak remedy will simply give Google a free pass.
DuckDuckGo knows better than anyone how important effective remedies are. Google was declared a monopolist in the European Union years ago, and the region imposed a choice screen in an attempt to create competition, asking device users to select their default search engine. But the approach has apparently not had the impact competitors once hoped, and Google remains overwhelmingly dominant.
“[W]“I can’t stress this enough: the details of the implementation matter,” Bazbaz said. In the EU, “there are some promising solutions, but Google has found it relatively easy to circumvent its own implementations.” DuckDuckGo is calling for a panel of “truly independent” technical experts to monitor any remedy imposed by the court, “to ensure that Google doesn’t find new ways to give itself preferential treatment.”
“[W]We cannot stress this enough: implementation details matter.”
DuckDuckGo said some solutions from Europe could be effective if implemented better. Instead of appearing just once during initial setup, for example, a choice screen could appear “periodically.” Instead, the company wants to ban “dark pattern” pop-ups that push people to revert to default settings, something it says isn’t enforced in the EU.
DuckDuckGo is also proposing that the court block Google from buying default status or pre-installation (which could derail its multibillion-dollar deal with Apple) and from providing access to its search and advertising APIs.
Yelp’s Stoppelman says Google should be forced to “spin off services that have unfairly benefited from its search monopoly, a simple and enforceable remedy to prevent future anticompetitive behavior.” The judge should also prohibit Google from using exclusive default search agreements and “auto-preferring its own content in search results,” Stoppelman said.
Other proponents of enforcement against Google, including groups representing publishers that advertise on the service or rely on search for traffic, also have suggestions. In a call with reporters hosted by the American Economic Liberties Project, Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint said that forcing Google to separate its Chrome and Android businesses could be a helpful solution. That’s because, Kint says, data from the browser and mobile operating system can be used to expand the reach of search queries and make that product even stronger. “The underlying data that ties all of that together is the critical resource that needs to be limited,” he says. AELP senior counsel Lee Hepner adds that separating the businesses “would open up competition for alternative search rivals on Chrome or Android.”
Whatever happens, the process could be a long one. Google’s president of global business Kent Walker confirmed that the company plans to appeal the ruling, saying the decision “recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”
Meanwhile, the specter of artificial intelligence looms over the case, threatening to undermine any proposed solution that doesn’t take into account how the entire search business model could change in the coming years. Hepner said the court could consider solutions such as requiring Google to open up access to its large language model (LLM).
Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter has not commented specifically on what remedies the department will seek, beyond noting that they “need to be forward-looking” to account for issues like AI. But he has previously said the division will “pursue structural remedies in our conduct cases whenever possible,” meaning breaks, rather than mandates to change certain behaviors. If the Justice Department proposes a broad remedy and Mehta rules in favor, the result could be an entirely new technology landscape.
“I believe Judge Mehta’s decision will have consequences as severe, if not more severe, than the Microsoft antitrust case of 23 years ago,” Stoppelman wrote. “That decision ushered in an era of unprecedented innovation that has allowed promising startups, including Google, to thrive. It’s exciting to imagine the new technologies and innovation we’ll see emerge as a result of this ruling in the coming decade and beyond.”
