The DOJ’s big case: Google, Google, Yahoo, Apple, DuckDuckGo, and Google wants to end its search engine monopoly deal
“This case is an extremely big deal. She said it was hard to overstate it. “It is at least as big a deal as the Microsoft case, which is the last big antitrust case that we had. And that was 25 years ago.”
In 1998, a case was filed between Microsoft and Netscape regarding the company’s bundling of its browser with its operating system. It nearly led to the company being split in two — but Microsoft and the DOJ settled.
Allensworth added that it’s also comparable to cases like the Justice Department’s 1906 Standard Oil case, which is widely considered the first major monopoly case. A federal court eventually found that the oil conglomerate owned by John D. Rockefeller had illegally monopolized the American refining industry. The companies that Standard Oil was ordered to break up into were all different.
The DOJ is calling on the company to divest from Chrome, its web browser, and to end exclusive distribution agreements with phone makers like Apple and Samsung, through which Google paid them to establish its search engine as the default browser on their phones. The DOJ wants Judge Mehta to stop google from setting similar exclusive distribution agreements for its artificial intelligence programs and apps.
Google, of course, argues that ChatGPT proves precisely that the search market is in fact plenty competitive. There is an internal document from OpenAI that states the company feels it has what it needs to win. “These companies are competing just fine without Plaintiffs’ remedies,” Schmidtlein said.
Lawyers for the Justice Department and Google are fighting it out at a federal courthouse in Washington. This time it’s to determine what penalties Mehta will levy against the roughly $2 trillion company.
Over the next several weeks, both sides will present evidence and are expected to call a host of witnesses, including major tech industry players. That includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of search engine competitor DuckDuckGo, as well as senior VP’s of Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, ChatGPT and Google, according to court documents — though that lineup could change.
The DOJ is asking for three broad things. It wants to stopgoogle from striking a deal for prime search engine placement. The central figure in the original trial was the fact that Apple paid $20 billion to become the default search engine in the Safari browser. There are other deals like this around the industry which make search placement a condition of other services. The DOJ would like to shut them all down.
As she stood outside of the courthouse on Monday morning, Gail Slater, the DOJ’S Assistant Attorney for the Antitrust Decision, asked what was dangerous. The threat Google presents to our freedom of speech” and the freedom of digital market innovation.
Slater was joined by other attorneys for the government who read from statements about an hour before proceedings began. They didn’t take questions from the media.
Do we really need a monopolist to manipulate the search market? Google vs. Washington, D.C.: Inflection point of the antitrust litigation case
The acting deputy director of the DOJ’s antitrust civil litigation division spoke in opening statements. In a roughly 45-minute presentation, he laid out a list of aggressive demands that the government wants to see Google implement.
This is an inflection point, he said. He asked the court if the US could allow a monopolist such as Google to control the search market or allow competition to prevail.
This case was the beginning of the end of the love affair between the tech world and Washington, D.C. For many years, the tech industry expanded with little regulatory control. But major tech players Meta, Amazon and Apple are now also facing federal lawsuits.
The same courthouse where the search engine’s trial is taking place has also been sued by the Federal Trade Commision. The agency says Meta acted as a monopoly by acquiring rivals in order to defeat them as competitors.
It is being asked by the DOJ that Google do not make monthly payments to phone makers in order to ensure that its browser is the default option on those phones.
The government is interested in preventing the creation of similar exclusive agreements for its generative artificial intelligence products by the company. If the company is allowed to keep using exclusive contracts, they want to prevent it from dominating another field, since that’s what the rise of the software could open up.
The company has always maintained that it has not acted as a monopoly and that small changes are unnecessary. The company’s leaders have said its search product is superior to competitors’ — and that’s why it dominates the industry.
John E. Schmidtlein, a lawyer for Google, argued in opening statements that the DOJ’s list of remedies in this case is just a “wishlist for competitors,” and that it will enable them to get resources that took Google decades to develop.
Addressing the DOJ’s effort to prevent Google from including Gemini in future exclusive distribution agreements, Schmidtlein said that Gemini was not the subject of the antitrust case and the company does not hold a monopoly on AI products.
The two sides are remarkably far apart, despite the fact that there is still a lot of trial and negotiation left. All will be fair if it is easy to find your own search engines, as was stated by Google in its entirety. The government believes that the current iteration of the internet search engine can’t be allowed to exist. Judge Mehta, who asked a number of questions about the precedent for some of these requests, seems to be continually calibrating his own tolerance for sweeping change. If there’s an easy way to arrive at some middle ground that works for everybody, it hasn’t come up in court.
The market forArtificial Intelligence only came up occasionally during the trial, but now appears to be front and center for both sides. The DOJ’s proposed remedies are so severe that they’re being used byGoogle, which is the same tactic they did for search. He was careful to say he didn’t think the rise of chatGPT should convince the court that the search market is competitive.
Near the beginning of his opening arguments, David Dahlquist, a lawyer for the US Department of Justice, showed a slide that he described as Google’s “vicious cycle.” It goes like this: Google pays billions of dollars to be the default search engine practically everywhere, thus it gets more search queries, thus it gets better data, thus it is able to improve its results, thus it makes more money, thus it can afford more defaults. Google doesn’t really disagree with this assessment — but in it’s telling, that’s a virtuous cycle. There is another way to describe it, which is that it is the cycle that makes search so powerful. Google believes it’s created a perfect system; the DOJ thinks it’s a nightmare. A judge will make the final call.