A US judge rules that Google is an illegal monopoly. Here’s what could happen next
But if Mehta pursues this approach, he should make some improvements to the EU rules, said Kamyl Bazbaz, senior vice president of public affairs at DuckDuckGo. Users should be reminded of selection screen periodically, not just once, Bazbaz said. They shouldn’t have to deal with pop-ups from Google urging them to default to Google, he added. And when users first interact with a competing search app, there should be an easy way to set it as the default.
With these additional measures, some searchers may find themselves more confident in abandoning Google. Others may feel frustrated by the repeated requests.
Place a divestment order
Contract bans and selection screening are examples of behavioral remedies. But the Justice Department in recent years has expressed a preference for what are known as structural remediationor split some parts of the company.
The most famous was the breakup of telephone giant Bell in the 1980s, which created several independent companies, including AT&T. But the courts don’t always get involved. When Microsoft lost an antitrust case in the 1990s, a federal appeals court discarded object a company dissolution order and eventually Microsoft introduced a series of behavioral changes.
One-time sales are popular with regulators in part because they don’t require them to invest in ongoing compliance monitoring for behavioral remedies. It’s a much cleaner breakup, and some antitrust experts argue that structural remedies are more effective.
The challenge is figuring out which parts of the company should be separated. John Kwoka, an economics professor at Northeastern University who recently advised FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan, said the key is identifying businesses where Google’s ownership “distorts its incentives.” For example, he said, cutting off search could open the door for Google’s Android to partner with another search engine.
But Hovenkamp doubts that selling off search would increase competition, since the service will remain popular. “Selling Google Search would just hand over the dominance to another company,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of breakup would work.”
Some financial analysts who study Google’s parent company, Alphabet, are also skeptical. “Alphabet’s scale, continued strong execution and financial strength mitigate this regulatory risk and the potential consequences for its business model and finances,” Emile El Nems, vice president at Moody’s Ratings, said in a press release.
Other legal experts envision a future where search results come from Google and in-experience ads come from a separate company that’s been spun out of Google. It’s unclear how that solution would affect users, but it’s likely that ads would become less relevant and more annoying.
Force Google to share
Mehta found in his ruling that Google provides a superior user experience because it receives billions more queries than any other search engine, and that data drives improvements to the algorithms that decide which results to display for a particular query.
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who sued Google, said one of the most drastic remedies would be to require Google to share data or algorithms with its search competitors so they could improve as well. “Courts don’t like forcing sharing between competitors like this, but on the other hand, the judge seems very concerned about how Google’s behavior has deprived competitors of what they really need to compete — scale in search data,” she said. “Forcing data sharing would directly address that concern.”
