Today's Edition
WASHINGTON (The New York Times)
Google said Friday what it thought should change to address a ruling that it had illegally maintained a monopoly over online search: not much.
Google’s proposal followed the landmark ruling in August by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who said Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search by paying companies like Apple and Samsung to be the search engine that automatically appears when users open a web browser or a smartphone. In response, the government last month asked the judge to force Google to sell Chrome, the world’s most popular browser, among other remedies.
In Google’s own proposal to fix the search monopoly, it asked Mehta to allow it to continue to pay other companies for its search engine to get prime placement. But it said those agreements should be less restrictive than in the past.
Apple, for example, could select different search engines to come up automatically for iPhone and iPad users, said Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s vice president of regulatory affairs, in a blog post. Cellphone makers using Google’s popular operating system, Android, could also install multiple search engines and could install other Google apps without installing its search tool.
"We don’t propose these changes lightly,” she said. "But we believe that they fully address the court’s findings and do so without putting Americans’ privacy and security at risk or harming America’s global technology leadership.”
Google still plans to appeal Mehta’s ruling after he decides on remedies sometime next year, Mulholland added.
What Mehta decides to do could reshape the core of Google, a $2.35 trillion company, and the digital economy more broadly. Google made more than half its revenue last year - $175 billion - from search and related businesses, and the company is so associated with search that its name has become a verb synonymous with looking for answers online.
Google’s attempts to fend off the government’s sweeping requests - the most significant remedies requested in a tech monopoly case since the Justice Department asked to break up Microsoft in 2000 - could help set a precedent for a string of other antitrust cases that challenge the dominance of tech behemoths.
The Justice Department has sued Apple, claiming the company makes it hard for consumers to leave its tight system of devices and software. Next year, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to go to trial against Meta, over claims that it snuffed out competition when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp. The agency has also filed a lawsuit against Amazon, accusing it of illegally protecting a monopoly in online retail, and is investigating Microsoft’s power in cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
A second Justice Department case against Google, alleging that it has a monopoly in advertising technology, is awaiting a decision by a federal judge in the coming weeks.
In the search case, which was filed in 2020 under the first administration of President-elect Donald Trump, Mehta agreed with the government that Google had benefited from a cycle of dominance.
In a 10-week trial last year, Justice Department lawyers said Google had locked out rivals by signing deals with Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and others to automatically appear as the search engine when users open a smartphone or a new tab in a web browser. In total, Google paid $26.3 billion as part of those deals in 2021, according to evidence presented at the trial.
Google argued that its deals had not broken the law and that users chose Google because it was better at finding information than search engines like Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo, a product that promises more privacy for its users.
Beyond the sale of Chrome, the government asked for a potential sale of Android, Google’s smartphone operating system. It also asked the court to stop the company from entering into paid agreements with Apple and others to be the search engine that is automatically selected on smartphones and in browsers. Google should also allow rival search engines to display the company’s results and have access to its data for a decade, the government proposed.
The government also said Google, whose parent company is Alphabet, should be forced to divest its stake in any artificial intelligence products that could compete with search, a bid to stop the company from dominating the nascent technology.
Google urged Mehta to take a narrower path to resolving those concerns. In addition to opportunities for other search engines to compete for prime placement on phones and browsers, Google said, browser manufacturers like Apple and Mozilla should be allowed to change their default search engines at least every 12 months.
The company proposed what it described in the blog post as a "robust mechanism” to comply with the court’s wishes, without "giving the government extensive power over the design of your online experience.”
In its filing, Google said the government sought a response from the judge that "exceeds the anticompetitive conduct found at trial.”
The company cited a 1955 opinion from a federal court that said even when a company was found to have broken antitrust laws, a court did not have "license to embark upon a general programme of comprehensive control of the defendants’ business.”
