Justice Department Doubles Down Against Google
The government's demands would reduce competition and harm consumer welfare.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted its revised proposed final judgment on Friday to Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in its antitrust case against Google, which now spans three presidential administrations.
The DOJ and the attorneys general of 11 states brought the case against Google under the first Trump administration in October 2020, accusing the company of monopolizing the search engine market. The plaintiffs accused the company of "implementing and enforcing a series of exclusionary agreements with distributors" to foreclose rivals from the search engine market.
The DOJ criticized Google for paying Apple around $10 billion every year to make Google the default search engine on Safari, Apple's default web browser, and Siri—though savvy users can change it. The Justice Department also identified Google's "anti-forking" agreements as anticompetitive. These agreements require Android manufacturers to use Google's version of the Android operating system and provide default distribution of Google's apps and search engine. Manufacturers who don't comply lose access to the Google Play services and are excluded from lucrative revenue sharing agreements.
The case continued under the Biden administration, and in August 2024, Mehta ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Instead of merely proposing monetary penalties or behavioral remedies, the DOJ also proposed structural remedies in November 2024. These included: divestiture from Chrome; prohibiting Google from "owning or acquiring any investment or interest in any…rival query-based [artificial intelligence] product"; terminating its paid partnership with Apple and self-preferencing with Android via bundling and revenue share agreements; divestiture from Android if "conduct remedies are not effective in preventing Google from improperly leveraging its control of the Android ecosystem to its advantage"; and requiring Google to make its search index and its search and advertisement data available to competitors at marginal and zero cost, respectively.
The claim that these remedies would substantially diminish Google's near-90 percent share of the general search engine market is highly dubious. Geoffrey A. Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics, described the proposed remedies as "fail[ing] to meet antitrust's requirement of a tight causal connection between offense and relief," while threatening browser competition—Firefox received 86 percent of its funding from Google in fiscal year 2021—and "dissuading venture capital in AI more broadly."
The revised proposal submitted on Friday mostly repeats the strong structural remedies originally proposed by the Biden administration. The most significant change was dropping the outright ban on owning and investing in AI products. However, the DOJ has maintained its mandate that Google provide publishers with a mechanism by which they may "opt-out of having the content of their web pages or domains…used to train or fine-tune any of Google's GenAI models." Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, said the company will appeal Mehta's decision after filing its revised proposed final judgment.
Manne tells Reason that the "new proposal shows that the DOJ under President Donald Trump intends to continue the highly politicized approach to Big Tech antitrust." A substantive continuation of the anti-Big Tech antitrust policy begun by the first Trump administration and intensified under former President Joe Biden bodes poorly for domestic investment, innovation, and consumer welfare.
