Google’s longtime rivals, such as Yelp and DuckDuckGo, scored a big win on Monday when a federal judge ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly. But their statements on the ruling expressed restraint. That’s because the work of restoring competition has only just begun, and the judge has yet to decide what that work will include. With many options on the table, Google’s competitors are pushing for changes they think will help their businesses — which could be harder than it sounds.
“While we are encouraged by this decision, it is critical that a robust solution is found,” said Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. wrote in a blog post after the ruling, referring to the new phase of the trial that will begin in September.
“We’ve passed a key milestone, but there’s still a lot of history left to be written,” Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s senior vice president of public affairs, said in a statement. “Google will do everything it can to hinder progress, so we hope to see a robust trial of solutions that can really look at all the details, propose a set of solutions that actually work, and establish an oversight body to manage them.”
These statements reflect an understanding that Judge Amit Mehta’s decision on how to restore competition will be as important (or more so) than his finding that Google violated antitrust law. The recently concluded liability phase found that Google violated the Sherman Act by entering into exclusionary contracts with phone and browser makers to maintain its position as the default search engine. In the remedies phase, Mehta will decide how to restore competition in general search services and search text advertising. But a weak remedy will simply give Google a free pass.
DuckDuckGo knows better than anyone how important effective remedies are. Years ago, Google was declared a monopolist in the European Union and the region imposed a selection screen in an attempt to create competition, asking device users to select their default search engine. But the approach has apparently not yielded results. so much impact as competitors once expected —and Google still has overwhelming dominance.
“We can’t stress this enough: implementation details matter,” Bazbaz said. In the EU, “there are some solutions that are promising, but Google has found it relatively easy to get around them.” DuckDuckGo is calling for a group of “truly independent” technical experts to oversee the court-imposed measures, “to ensure that Google doesn’t find new ways to give itself preferential treatment.”
“We cannot stress this enough: implementation details matter”
DuckDuckGo said some European solutions could be effective if implemented in a better way. Instead of appearing just once during initial setup, for example, a selection screen could appear “periodically.” In contrast, the company wants to ban “dark pattern” pop-ups that push users back to default settings — something it says is not enforced in the EU.
DuckDuckGo is also proposing that the court prohibit Google from purchasing default status or pre-installation (which could derail its multi-billion dollar deal with Apple) and from providing access to its search and advertising APIs.
Yelp’s Stoppelman says Google should be required to “break up services that have unfairly benefited from its search monopoly — a simple, enforceable remedy to prevent future anticompetitive conduct.” The judge should also prohibit Google from using exclusive default search agreements and “self-preferring its own content in search results,” Stoppelman said.
Other advocates for enforcement against Google, including groups representing publishers who advertise on the service or rely on search for traffic, also have suggestions. On a call with reporters hosted by the American Economic Liberties Project, Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, said that forcing Google to separate its Chrome and Android businesses could be a useful solution. That’s because, Kint says, browser and mobile operating system data can be used to scale search queries and make that product even stronger. “The underlying data that weaves all of that together is the critical asset that needs to be constrained,” he says. AELP senior legal counsel Lee Hepner adds that separating the businesses “would open up competition for alternative search rivals on Chrome or Android.”
Whatever happens, the process could be very long. Google's president of global affairs, Kent Walker, confirmed that the company plans to appeal the ruling, saying that the decision “recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we should not be allowed to make it readily available.”
Meanwhile, the specter of artificial intelligence looms over the case, threatening to render useless any proposed solution that fails to take into account how it could change the entire search business model in the coming years. Hepner said the court could consider solutions such as requiring Google to open up access to its large language model (LLM).
Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter has not commented specifically on what remedies the department will seek, other than to say that they “need to be forward-thinking” to take into account issues like ai. He said earlier that the division would “pursue structural remedies in our conduct cases whenever possible” — that is, dissolutions, rather than mandates to change certain behaviors. If the Justice Department proposes a broad remedy and Mehta rules in favor of it, the result could be an entirely new technological landscape.
“I believe Judge Mehta’s decision will be as consequential, if not more so, than the Microsoft antitrust case 23 years ago,” Stoppelman wrote. “That decision spurred an unprecedented era of innovation that allowed promising startups, including Google, to flourish. It’s exciting to imagine the new technologies and innovations we’ll see emerge as a result of this ruling in the next decade and beyond.”
