What Google’s Rivals Want After DOJ Wins Antitrust Trial

Longtime Google rivals like Yelp and DuckDuckGo scored a major victory Monday when a federal judge ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly. But their statements about the ruling were restrained. That’s because the work of restoring competition has only just begun, and the judge has yet to decide what that work will entail. With so many options on the table, Google’s rivals are pushing for changes they believe will help their businesses, which may be harder than it seems.

“While we are relieved by the decision, robust treatment is critical,” said Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. He wrote in a blog post After the verdict is issued, referring to the new trial phase that will begin next September.

“We’ve passed an important milestone, but there’s still a lot of history to be written,” Camille Bazbaz, senior vice president of public affairs at DuckDuckGo, said in a statement. “Google will do everything it can to prevent progress, which is why we hope to see a robust therapeutics trial that can really dig into all the details, propose a set of treatments that will actually work, and create a monitoring body to govern them.”

These statements reflect an understanding that Judge Amit Mehta’s decision on how to restore competition will be as important—if not more so—than his conclusion 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 default search position. In the remedy phase, Mehta will decide how to restore competition in general search services and text-based search advertising. But a weak remedy will simply give Google a pass.

DuckDuckGo knows better than most how important it is to have effective solutions. Google was ruled a monopoly in the European Union years ago, and the region imposed a choice screen in an attempt to create competition, asking device users to select their default search engine. But that approach doesn’t seem to have produced any positive results. As much as it had an impact As competitors once hoped – Google remains overwhelmingly dominant.

“[W]“I can’t stress this enough: the details of implementation matter,” Bazbaz said. In the EU, “there are some promising solutions, but Google has found it relatively easy to get around their implementation.” DuckDuckGo is calling for a group of “truly independent” technical experts to monitor any court-mandated measures, “to ensure that Google doesn’t find new ways to give itself preferential treatment.”

DuckDuckGo said some of the solutions from Europe could work, if they were implemented better. Instead of popping up just once during initial setup, for example, the selection screen could appear “periodically.” Conversely, the company wants to block “dark mode” pop-ups that prompt people to revert to the default, something it says isn’t implemented in the EU.

DuckDuckGo also suggests that the court should prevent Google from buying default or pre-installation (which could ruin its multibillion-dollar deal with Apple) and providing access to search and advertising APIs.

Yelp’s Stoppelman says Google should be required to “break up the services that have unfairly benefited from its search monopoly, a direct and enforceable remedy to prevent future anticompetitive behavior.” The judge should also bar Google from using virtual search exclusivity deals and from “favoring its own content in search results,” Stoppelman added.

Other advocates for enforcing the law on Google, including groups representing publishers who advertise on the service or rely on search for traffic, have suggestions as well. In a call with reporters organized by the American Economic Liberties Project, Jason Kent, CEO of Digital Content Next, said that forcing Google to separate its Chrome and Android businesses could be a useful solution. That’s because Kent says data from the browser and mobile operating system can be used to scale search queries and make the product stronger. “The underlying data that’s intertwined with all of that is the critical asset that needs to be restricted,” he says. AELP senior counsel Lee Hepner adds that separating the businesses “would open up competition to alternative search competitors on Chrome or Android.”

Whatever happens, the process could be long. Google’s global affairs chief Kent Walker confirmed that the company plans to appeal the ruling, saying the decision “recognizes that Google provides the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”

Meanwhile, the specter of artificial intelligence looms over the case, threatening to invalidate any proposed solution that doesn’t take into account how the entire business model of search could change in the coming years. Heppner said the court could consider solutions such as requiring Google to open up access to its large language model (LLM).

The Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, did not comment specifically on what solutions the department would seek, other than to note that it “needs to be forward-looking” in dealing with issues like artificial intelligence. But He said before The department will “seek structural solutions to our behavior issues whenever possible,” meaning separation, rather than imposing orders to change specific behaviors. If the Justice Department proposes a broad remedy and Mehta rules in its favor, the result could be a whole new tech landscape.

“I believe Judge Mehta’s decision will have as much, if not more, consequences than the Microsoft antitrust case 23 years ago,” Stoppelman wrote. “That decision sparked an era of unprecedented innovation that allowed promising startups, including Google, to flourish. It’s exciting to imagine what new technologies and innovations we’ll see emerge as a result of this ruling over the next decade and beyond.”