U.S. Judge Issues Remedies in Google Antitrust Case ⇥ bbc.com
Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch:
U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta outlined remedies on Tuesday that would bar Google from entering or maintaining exclusive deals that tie the distribution of Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini to other apps or revenue arrangements. For example, Google wouldn’t be able to condition Play Store licensing on the distribution of certain apps, or tie revenue-share payments to keeping certain apps.
Mehta’s full decision (PDF) is written to be read by non-lawyers. Even so, I admit I have only read the introduction — which includes some high-level explanations of the remedies — and skimmed much of the rest. It is a couple hundred pages long for those who want to put in a little more work than I did.
I did notice a potentially interesting deposition referenced on page 21 regarding the relative performance of Google’s A.I. search summaries compared to organic search results. I sure wish a transcript would be published.
Lily Jamali, BBC News:
The judge will also allow certain competitors to display Google search results as their own in a bid to give them the time and resources they need to innovate.
The judge is allowing Google to continue to pay companies like Apple and Samsung for distribution of its search engine on devices and browsers, but will bar Google from maintaining exclusive contracts.
The latter must be quite the relief to Apple, which gets tens of billions of dollars a year because people use Safari to search with Google, and to Mozilla, which gets to keep existing.
And then there’s Google’s data. Google is the world’s most prolific surveiller, and the company boasts to investors about the advantage that its 24/7 spying confers on it in the search market, because Google knows so much about us and can therefore tailor our results. Even if this is true – a big if – it’s nevertheless a fucking nightmare. Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too. Any remedy worth the name would have required Google to delete (“disgorge,” in law-speak) all that data […]
Some people in the antitrust world didn’t see it that way. Out of a misguided kind of privacy nihilism, they called for Google to be forced to share the data it stole from us, so that potential competitors could tune their search tools on the monopolist’s population-scale privacy violations.
And that is what the court has ordered.
Much like the Microsoft antitrust case that preceded Google’s by a couple decades, the proposed solutions basically treat Google with kid gloves. The judge admitted in the introduction of treating this case with “humility”, having “no expertise in the business of [general search engines], the buying and selling of search text ads, or the engineering of GenAI technologies”. That is true enough. Yet judges are often expected to rule on cases with subject matter about which they have no particular expertise. The judge appears to be comfortable assuming the generative A.I. boom is providing Google with ample competition.
This conclusion ultimately seems as though Mehta is doing something, yet Google has to change very little. It is difficult for me to believe this will be disruptive to Google’s search monopoly. Again, as with the years-ago hesitancy to impose serious conditions on Microsoft or break it up, Google will probably emerge as an even stronger force while technically complying with a ruling finding its monopoly illegal.