Photo: Canva
Will Google’s Antitrust Trial Guide the Internet’s Future?
The Justice Department’s landmark antitrust case against Google, which started last week, is being viewed as the first monopoly trial of the modern internet era that may guide the next era of the internet led by artificial intelligence.
“This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition,” said Justice Department lawyer Kenneth Dintzer during opening remarks, according to the Financial Times.
The trial, expected to last 10 weeks, comes as AI and new forms of search, such as ChatGPT, are providing a more serious threat to Google’s dominance than the company has encountered in years.
The government’s lawsuit focuses on billions of dollars in payments Google paid to wireless carriers, browser developers, and device manufacturers to be pre-installed as the default online search engine on their mobile phones and computers. The DOJ claims Google typically pays more than $10 billion a year for that privilege, The Associated Press reported.
“Defaults are powerful, scale matters and Google illegally maintained a monopoly for more than a decade,” said Dintzer, who is spearheading the DOJ’s case, according to Reuters.
The result has been reduced choice for consumers as Google’s moves have blocked potential rivals that may have delivered a better search product with fewer demands for access to consumers’ personal data, the DOJ concludes.
Google’s main argument is that people overwhelmingly choose Google search because it’s a superior product while noting that it’s easy to switch search engines. Google further notes that while it may have a 90% market share, it still faces plenty of competition. Besides search engines like Microsoft’s’ Bing platform, search competitors include Amazon for products; specialized sites like Yelp to find restaurants, airline flights, and other items; and TikTok, Reddit, and ChatGPT for informational queries.
“There are lots of ways users access the web, other than through default search engines, and people use them all the time,” Google’s lawyer, John Schmidtlein, said in opening arguments, according to the BBC. “The evidence in this case will show Google competed on the merits to win pre-installation and default status, and that its browser and Android partners judged Google to be the best search engine for its users.”
The case is a crucial test of the power of U.S. regulators over tech giants like Google.
“It will affect a lot of other cases as well and whether we can really use the antitrust laws to rein in Big Tech,” Kathleen Bradish, acting president of the American Antitrust Institute, an organization that advocates for antitrust enforcement, told NBC News.
In a column for the New York Times, Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and author of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age,” wrote that similar to the Federal Trade Commission’s coming trial of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, on monopolization charges, the Google trial will be about effectively establishing rules governing tech competition for the next decade, including over commercializing artificial intelligence. He said, “The path of technological evolution is not predictable. But we do know that monopolies tend to stifle innovation and keep too much for themselves, and that forcing a monopolist to back off yields fruit.”
Discussion Questions
What are the potential ramifications of the Google antitrust trial for retailers and consumers? What do you suspect will be the outcome?
Poll
Loading …BrainTrust
Brandon Rael
Strategy & Operations Transformation Leader
Neil Saunders
Managing Director, GlobalData
The term monopoly is misused and abused regularly. Monopoly means having an exclusive purview over a particular economic area, not simply being big. Google does not have exclusive rights to search. As such, I do not see Google as a monopoly. Sure, they’re dominant and they’re the default browser on some systems, but there are other options available. And those other options are very easy to use and switch to. These now include newer channels like TikTok, Amazon, and OpenAI – which an increasing number of people use to search for products and other services and trends.
I think what you are identifying, Neil, is this all politians theater.
Absolutely Gene!
Google has evolved with the times and remains synonymous with the search and discovery process. At the surface, their dominance, omnipresence, scale, technological innovations, and vast capabilities beyond search certainly place Google in a monopolistic-like position. However, there is competition regarding browsers, discovery engines, and social media platforms for new content. Yet, Google, in a free market capitalistic system, outperforms its competition and is the default browser of choice.
It takes a diversification strategy of services and capabilities to remain at the top for so long. Google has diversified well beyond the browser and offers an enterprise-like scale with its productivity, collaboration tools, storage, commerce capabilities, photos, maps, educational tools, Chromebooks, etc. A monopoly implies that Google has a dominant position in one particular segment. However, that is not the case, as Google has extended its reach and service offerings well beyond its heritage search engine that we all migrated to in the late 90s and early 00s.
Chrome dominates the browser market despite Microsoft and Apple pushing their browsers in their PCs. Apple and Samsung are dominant in the global smart phone market and both have default browsers. And yet, Safari and Chrome control over 80% of the global browser market. I think if there are any implications, one might be that all manufacturers will have to drop their default “applications” much like Microsoft is being forced to drop Teams by the EU. Ironically, this could help Chrome. Unfortunately, it appears that this move is more representative of the usual grandstanding than actual consumer protection, at least from the Monopoly Monster. I believe the outcome will be what it should be and people will continue to choose Chrome because it is easy to use and performs well in meeting its original vision of being the window to the web…that is, until the second coming and all powerful AI (not Oz) destroys everything on its way to complete, world domination, including any chromium windows to the web, {insert evil laughter}!!!
Oh, Google is controlling search for reasons other than performance?
I have a Surface tablet and use Windows. It seems once a week; something changes in my computer that switches Chrome to Bing as a default. I assure everyone, it isn’t me.
The U.S. has been soft on market consolidation since the 1980s. But, most of the combinations were under the headline radar. Google is a headline maker and worth too many political points. The government should look at companies that stifle innovation and market access, not ones that are the leading innovators in the world.