Yesterday’s Google antitrust ruling was historic.
It may be kind of obvious to most people that a company handling 90% or more of search queries in the U.S. is a monopolist, but it’s nonetheless a big deal for a judge to rule as such—and to confirm that Google was therefore breaking antitrust rules when it shored up that outsized position by paying billions to Apple, Samsung and other players to make Google Search the default on their devices.
This, and U.S. judge Amit Mehta’s finding that Google’s monopolistic position has allowed it to charge excessive prices for search text ads, constitute the biggest outcome in U.S. tech antitrust history since the Microsoft ruling nearly quarter of a century ago. It will most likely have a big impact. But we are far from knowing what that impact will be, because Mehta is yet to lay out how Google must fix things—and this next part of the proceedings could come within six months, or it could be delayed for a long time by Google’s promised appeal.
So, for now, we have to play the conjecture game.
Given the fact that exclusive default-search payments are at the core of the case, it is quite possible that Mehta will demand their end. That would represent a hit to the bottom lines of the companies Google has been paying; Apple alone has been making as much as $20 billion a year out of this scheme. As my colleague Jason Del Rey wrote yesterday, Firefox-maker Mozilla in particular faces an existential threat in this scenario, as it is almost entirely funded by payments for making Google its default search engine.
But it’s very unclear how things might change for consumers as a result of yesterday’s ruling.
Mehta may merely tell Google to start sharing its search data with rival search providers, which could promote competition in the sector without users seeing much that's different.
It is possible that people will be presented with a search engine choice when firing up their browser for the first time—Google already does this in Chrome in Europe, to comply with new antitrust laws there. It could be that Apple will start offering its own search engine in Safari, though this would cost billions to develop, and it’s just as likely that there would be an opening for Microsoft’s Bing on the iPhone, or perhaps the search engine that’s being developed by new Apple partner OpenAI.
Whatever happens will come at a time when search is already in flux—new entrants like OpenAI and Perplexity, and indeed Google itself, are starting to use AI to give people more definitive-seeming answers to their search queries, rather than presenting them with lists. (Disclosure: Fortune recently struck a revenue-sharing deal with Perplexity.) I suspect that, years down the line, people will be furiously debating how much of an effect the Google antitrust ruling really had in the grand scheme of things, just as they’ve argued about the true impact of Europe forcing Microsoft to proactively give people a choice of browser on their Windows PCs back in 2010.
That is, unless Mehta takes the nuclear option and decides that Google must divest Chrome or even Android. This sort of effect is not up for much interpretation, though my gut feeling is that it’s unlikely.
However, there is one thing we can say for sure: This precedent-setting ruling will add fuel to the other big antitrust lawsuits that are underway, involving Meta, Apple, Amazon—and again Google, which the Justice Department is suing over its ad-tech practices. In those contexts, it’s a big endorsement for the department’s antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, and his aggressive approach to tackling Big Tech. (Kanter was a Biden appointee, though this Google search case dates back to the Trump era.)
“This landmark decision holds Google accountable. It paves the path for innovation for generations to come and protects access to information for all Americans,” Kanter said in a statement.
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David Meyer
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