A three-week case focused on whether Google’s monopoly on search engines should be broken up will begin Monday, as the company warns that the Justice Department is throwing “caution to the wind.”
District Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled last summer that Google had a monopoly on online search. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” he wrote.
Mehta is now overseeing how to fix the monopoly. The Justice Department wants a breakup of the monopoly by forcing it to sell its Chrome browser or sell Android. Officials believe “robust remedies” are required to restore competition and that Google could also dominate the artificial intelligence field if not reined in.
“The Google search case matters because nothing less than the future of the internet is at stake here,” Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, said before opening arguments Monday. “Are we going to give Americans choices and allow innovation and competition to thrive online? Or will we maintain the status quo that favors Big Tech monopolies? If Google’s conduct is not remedied, it will control much of the internet for the next decade and not just in internet search, but in new technologies like artificial intelligence.”
The Justice Department used its AI stance in its opening arguments Monday, with DOJ attorney David Dahlquist saying that Google was already using AI as a method to access search.
“This court’s remedy should be forward-looking and not ignore what is on the horizon,” Dahlquist said, noting that the DOJ will call witnesses from OpenAI and Perplexity to provide background on AI.
Google believes the Justice Department is going too far in its antitrust pursuits.
“When it comes to antitrust remedies, the U.S. Supreme Court has said that ‘caution is key,’” Google executive Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a blog post Sunday. “DOJ’s proposal throws that caution to the wind.”
During opening arguments, Google lawyer John Schmidtlein called the Justice Department’s proposals “extreme remedies” that would “reward competitors with advantages they never would have earned in the market.”
Schmidtlein said the United States would force Google to share data behind its search results, potentially harming user privacy and penalizing the company unfairly. He said Mehta should focus on preferential contracts with device makers that were at issue in the case to “pry open the market.”
Mehta interjected, saying that the increased amount of data Google collected was because of its monopoly.
“There is some relationship between data and search quality,” Mehta said. “How then does the market look any different unless there’s a remedy that addresses the gap in data?”
Schmidtlein said he believes the Justice Department has not laid out a case that demonstrates how much data Google garnered from its illegal monopoly versus what it gained from being the best search engine.
“Google won its place in the market fair and square,” he said.
Company personnel said before the trial that they hope Mehta does not put the court in a position to act as a “central planner for the market.”
“One of the things that the judge is going to have to think about is crafting remedies that don’t harm competition, that don’t harm consumers, that don’t harm incentives to innovate and invest, and don’t put the court in the position of acting as a central planner for the market,” a Google representative told reporters ahead of the trial.
Google personnel especially disagree with a Justice Department proposal that would give a boost to other search engines, such as Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo, that would force them to hand over search data.
The company argues it should be allowed to pay companies such as Apple to use its search engine, and that discontinuing such deals as proposed is excessive. Google lawyers argue, instead, that it could be disciplined by allowing the companies to call off their deals with the company once per year. They would allow those companies to seek out different automatic search engines for different features, and they would give phone manufacturers more freedom to decide what Google apps to install on their phones.
WHO IS JAMES BOASBERG? DC JUDGE AT CENTER OF IMPEACHMENT FIGHT OVER TRUMP IMMIGRATION PLANS
The ruling in the case will likely forever impact the internet, given Google’s significant role in people’s everyday lives on the web. Kamyl Bazbaz, the senior vice president of public affairs for DuckDuckGo, told the New York Times he’s watching the case and waiting to see the outcome.
“There isn’t a single thing to do right now to actually prepare, besides getting ready to watch the case really closely,” he said. Bazbaz says whatever is decided could change “nothing less than how everybody uses the internet.”