Opinion

What will the Google antitrust ruling mean for search — and all of us?

The question Google has always asked is why people would want to choose another search site. Google, after all, is the best. But that’s exactly the point: Google is the best because the more people use it, the more data it has to improve its results. The more it improves its results, the more people use it. This virtuous cycle makes Google’s dominance in search essentially a natural monopoly. That gives it all the advantage it ought to need to earn default placement on iPhones or anywhere else on the merits. So why allow it to buy even more of a leg up, at a price no one else (thanks to its monopoly) can afford?

This makes for a reasonable policy argument. Whether it makes for a solid legal argument is less certain. The courts have generally decided that prosecutors must show some harm to consumers to win an antitrust case, but exactly how consumers are harmed here is unclear. It’s also difficult to prove that Google has ceased to innovate because its default status wards off any competitive threat. Besides, telling Google it can’t pay Apple punishes Apple, too.

We’ll see what happens as this issue wends its slow way through the courts — but it might turn out that this isn’t an issue for the courts at all. Truly transforming modern-day antitrust might be a job for Congress.

Catherine Rampell: A narrow ruling means many possible remedies

Some news coverage has implied that this Google decision will be the start of breaking up Big Tech. But even if this ruling ultimately survives whatever appeals will come, a breakup is unlikely to be on the table for Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Any “remedies” — actions the court orders to set things right — will probably be much more modest than the dreams of the “Big Is Bad” folks.

That’s because the court’s decision in this case was pretty narrow. Judge Amit P. Mehta didn’t dispute that Google had offered a superior product and won competition on the merits; most of his ruling was about how Google had then illegally maintained its monopoly in “general search engines,” by paying Apple and Samsung to be the default search engine on their phones and other products. (The judge rejected many of the more expansive claims made by states and the U.S. Justice Department.)

If that dominance were stripped away, the hope is that Bing — or DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or other search engines — would use the boon of seeing more of our search queries to build better, more competitive search results. Of course, directing more traffic to Bing would also be quite good for the profitability of Bing, which is owned by Microsoft.

So one possible remedy is that Google just pays a fine, and maybe even maintains its default position, but is forced to share all its search query data with its rivals — though privacy advocates might have something to say about even more widespread sharing of consumer data.

A more likely option is that Google is no longer allowed to pay Apple $20 billion per year to be Safari’s default search engine. This could have some unintended consequences, hurting not just Apple’s bottom line but also Mozilla’s; more than 80 percent of that company’s revenue comes from Google’s payments to be the default search on Firefox).

And, ironically, this outcome might actually help Google. One detail that came out in the trial, cited by the judge in his decision: Even though Windows users were defaulted to Microsoft’s Edge browser and Bing search, 80 percent of them chose to switch to Google search anyway (either directly or by installing Google’s Chrome browser). So even if Google’s default setting on Apple devices soon goes away, most users still might manually switch to Google, meaning Google retains most of the valuable traffic without having to pay.

A final possibility: The next time we buy a phone, we’ll get the full European experience of being asked to select a browser and a search engine. And we’ll all still select Google.

Megan McArdle: Don’t overlook the innovations of monopolists

If you are reading this on a device other than pulped-up dead trees, you can thank Bell Labs. During the golden age of landline telephony, Bell’s in-house skunk works was a fountain of useful inventions, from the laser to the photovoltaic cell to the transistor upon which modern microchips are based. This largesse was, of course, subsidized by Bell’s monopoly over a singularly useful technology.

Monopolists have a bad name, deservedly, as they often use their market power to deliver worse goods and services at a premium price. But monopoly profits aren’t always siphoned off into monopolist pockets; sometimes, they subsidize socially useful goods.

That’s worth thinking about now that Judge Amit P. Mehta has ruled that Google has a monopoly over search.

It’s not yet clear what sorts of remedies Mehta might impose. The possibilities range from the relatively minor — restricting Google’s ability to pay for positioning as the default search engine on browsers and devices — to carving the company apart. But the more drastic the surgery, the more it will cut into the revenue that is currently subsidizing pie-in-the-sky long-term technology bets, such as self-driving-taxi service Waymo, along with various services that are unlikely to ever become major revenue sources, such as Google Scholar and Google Books.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the antitrust ruling is necessarily wrong. It’s nice to get free research and development from monopolists, but it doesn’t necessarily offset the large social costs — as well as the potential costs of monopolists using their power to squash innovative upstart competition. Personally, having tried most of the other available browsers and found them wanting, I’m skeptical that consumers would benefit by being pushed toward those instead, but there’s no way to be sure until we experience the aftermath of whatever remedies await.

Bina Venkataraman: This ruling is a cautionary tale for AI

One day in the future, all your urgent and idle questions — where to find a good bowl of ramen, the forgotten name of a book you read in college, the best doctor in Chicago — might get answered by an armada of AI agents, including chatbots powered by large language models such as Claude and ChatGPT. But for now, most people connected to the internet get their answers from Google search, which captures more than 90 percent of the global market of online queries.

The fiction of a Google search is that it scours the web for the best information out there, spitting out answers that best serve your needs. The reality is that though Google started out prioritizing the most networked and relevant results, these days searchers have to wade through a thicket of advertisements, search-engine-optimized content that might or might not be correct and, yes, unreliable AI content. Without competition, it’s a problem that’s poised to get worse.

Google’s revenue comes primarily from the advertisements, even though co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in a foundational research paper about their search engine, argued that “advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.” And now, Judge Amit P. Mehta has deemed that Google wielded illegal monopoly power — with practices such as paying Apple to be the default search engine in the iPhone’s Safari browser. Such moves, which aimed to solidify the early dominance Google established from outperforming its competition, have made it nearly impossible for upstart search companies with different principles or business models to compete.

Another round of court proceedings will follow Mehta’s ruling to determine what Google has to change about its practices — or its structure — to allow for a more competitive marketplace. Regardless of the prescription, one good outcome would be for the ruling to serve as a warning to tech companies seeking to dominate markets for AI-driven answer services: Having the best product at one moment is not an excuse for crowding out competitors. This antitrust case, alongside others pending against Meta, Apple and Google, is seminal not because it will break the back of Big Tech — it likely won’t — but because it could encourage the companies building the next era of information services to continue to innovate and give the public better choices, instead of elbowing the competition out of the game.

We should all welcome a true marketplace in which we can get answers to our questions from a broad range of organizations, in competition to raise the bar for how useful the answers are, how our personal data is used, and how much truth or misinformation they cough up. For now, a number of companies are in the game to create the next era of AI technologies offering such answers. The Google ruling makes it more likely that no single one will overshadow the rest.