When Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on Monday that Google had engaged in illegal behavior to maintain a monopoly on web search, major media outlets didn’t hesitate to call the decision a “landmark.” That would be a fair assessment if we were talking about the fate of just one huge, extraordinarily powerful tech company. But the ruling is the most dramatic development yet in the bigger story of the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission’s current antitrust cases against not only Google but also Apple, Meta, and Amazon. Once they work their way through the legal system—a process that will take years—the impact on the tech industry and life in general could be epoch-shifting.
For now, however, it would be a mistake to devote too many brain cells to figuring out the Google ruling’s eventual upshot. Mehta hasn’t yet said what repercussions the company might face, which could range from a forced breakup akin to the one imposed on Standard Oil in 1910 and AT&T in 1982 to more targeted limitations on its ability to strike deals such as the one that makes Google the default search engine on Apple devices. Even if he errs on the side of radical intervention, further courtroom drama is inevitable and could result in less-dire consequences for Google. There’s obvious precedent in the antitrust case against Microsoft, which dragged on for years and nearly resulted in the software giant being split in two—until it wasn’t.
Mehta’s 286-page ruling is a fascinating read, and certainly worth at least a quick skim if you’re at all interested in the machinations of how Google maintains its control over search. The judge concludes that the company’s ability to throw money at Apple, Samsung, and others for default placement, as well as its control of Android, gives it an insurmountable advantage over would-be rivals such as DuckDuckGo and (RIP) Neeva. He argues that Google Search’s resulting market share—89.2%, according to the ruling—gives it unparalleled access to data that’s invaluable both for search in its current form and new forays into artificial intelligence. He also says that Google’s control over search advertising has permitted it to manipulate ad pricing in a way it couldn’t if it faced more robust competition.
One big takeaway: It’s awfully late in the game to be trying to do anything about all of this. Even 15-plus years ago, when search startups such as Powerset and Cuil set out to build Google killers (Spoiler: They didn’t get far), the search giant may have been impossible to dislodge. In retrospect, maybe regulators should have tamped down more on Google’s yen for world domination back then—say, by nixing its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, which extended its reach into the display advertising field. Then again, as I was reminded by this New York Times article by Saul Hansell, Yahoo’s display ads business was seven times bigger than DoubleClick. It’s not Google’s fault that Yahoo proved incapable of capitalizing on that early lead.
As for Google’s current ability to push advertisers around—well, after spending my entire career working in the media business, I cheerfully cop to some biases. I don’t love the fact that the company has been far more effective at hoovering up ad dollars than any company whose content shows up in its search results. But here Google does have to compete with two other digital advertising giants—Meta and Amazon—and its grip on the overall market has grown less all-powerful over time.
Ultimately, I can’t imagine there are many people not employed by Google who believe we wouldn’t all be better off if there were at least one other search company at least remotely comparable in scale. While I buy the company’s stance that it became incredibly successful by being incredibly useful, recent years have seen it struggling with search quality and emphasizing ads over organic results in ways that have a whiff of monopolistic complacency to them. At its worst, the Google Search of the past few years reminds me of Microsoft’s famously awful Windows Vista, an operating system upgrade that seemed to have lost touch with its own mojo.
Still, Google’s current command over search doesn’t strike me as being all that similar to the control Microsoft, AT&T, and Standard Oil once exerted over their respective categories. Early in this century, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was such an unavoidable fact of online life that many websites literally didn’t work in other browsers. Today, Google is unquestionably the world’s default search engine, not just in terms of what’s preloaded on our devices, but also the one our brains have become hardwired to use. Yet there are multiple viable alternatives, from Microsoft’s Bing—the search equivalent of Pepsi, or at least RC Cola—to upstarts such as DuckDuckGo, You.com, and Brave Search. I’ve been paying for Kagi, which is based in part on Google’s search index, but with enough worthy twists to make it worth $10 a month.
I’m aware that none of these products is going to turn into a Google-like profit machine and industry behemoth. Even if Apple and others were forced to let users proactively pick a search engine—as the European Commission once compelled Microsoft to help people pick a browser—Google would likely win in a landslide based on name recognition, comfort level, and maybe even quality. That’s okay. The bottom line is that it’s entirely possible to live without Google if you so desire. Easy, even.
There’s another way Google’s present situation is distinct from the great antitrust battles of the past. Mehta’s decision comes as web search in its conventional, Google-esque form faces a great big threat from generative AI chatbots and other tools that aim to simply answer your questions rather than send you packing off around the web in search of information. Though his ruling touches AI, it name-checks OpenAI’s ChatGPT only in passing and doesn’t mention Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity, Arc Search, or even the AI Overviews that precede some Google results. Who knows what the field will look like by the time Google is actually required to implement any government-mandated changes to its business.
Already, it’s clear the company will have to work hard to turn its legacy in old-school search into anything like comparable leadership in the AI era. So far, it’s been stepping on rakes in a way that doesn’t exactly instill fear, and has yet to prove that its trove of data automatically results in better products. It also has to figure out how to incorporate AI without destroying its existing business model of mixing paid links with search results, a giant-size albatross that OpenAI and Anthropic don’t have to worry about.
By their nature, the antitrust cases the DOJ and FTC are pursuing against Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta move slowly. They’re inherently backward-looking, involving documentable facts about a company’s past behavior in established markets. But the future of tech is unpredictable, unforgiving, and coming at us faster than ever—and over time, it’s a more potent force for change than anything that might emerge from a courtroom.
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