What Google’s Competitors Want After Justice Department’s Antitrust Victory

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

“While we are heartened by this decision, strong corrective action is necessary,” Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote in a blog post after the ruling was announced, referring to a new phase of the trial that will begin in September.

“We’ve passed a key milestone, but there are still many stories to tell,” Kamyl Bazbaz, senior vice president of public affairs at DuckDuckGo, said in a statement. “Google will do everything it can to stand in the way of progress, so we hope to see a robust test of remedies that really digs into all the details, proposes a range of remedies that actually work, and establishes a monitoring body to administer them.”

The statements reflect an understanding that Judge Amit Mehta’s decision on how to restore competition will be just as — if not more — important than his finding that Google violated antitrust law. The recently concluded liability phase found that Google violated the Sherman Act through exclusionary agreements with phone and browser makers to maintain its default search engine position. In the remedies phase, Mehta will decide how to restore competition in general search services and text ads on search engines. But weak remedies will simply allow Google to pass.

DuckDuckGo knows better than most how important effective countermeasures are. Google was declared a monopoly in the European Union years ago, and the region imposed a choice screen to create competition by asking device users to choose a default search engine. But that approach clearly hasn’t had as much impact as competitors once hoped — and Google remains overwhelmingly dominant.

“(W)e can’t emphasize this enough: implementation details matter,” Bazbaz said. In the EU, “there are some solutions that are promising, but Google has found that it’s relatively easy to circumvent their implementation.” DuckDuckGo is calling on a group of “truly independent” technical experts to monitor any court-ordered remedies “to ensure that Google doesn’t find new ways to secure preferential treatment.”

DuckDuckGo said some of the solutions from Europe could be effective if they were implemented better. Instead of appearing only once during the initial setup, for example, the selection screen could pop up “periodically.” On the other hand, the company wants to ban “dark patterns” of popups that send people back to default settings, something it says has not been enforced in the EU.

DuckDuckGo is also proposing that the court prohibit Google from buying default status or preinstallation (which could undermine a billion-dollar deal with Apple) and from allowing access to its search and advertising APIs.

Yelp’s Stoppelman argues that Google should be required to “carve out services that have unfairly benefited from its search monopoly, a simple and enforceable remedy to prevent future anticompetitive conduct.” The judge should also prohibit Google from using exclusive default search agreements and “independently favoring its own content in search results,” Stoppelman said.

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

Whatever happens, the process could be lengthy. Google’s global president, Kent Walker, confirmed the company plans to appeal the ruling, saying the decision “recognizes that Google offers the best search engine but says we shouldn’t be able to easily share it.”

Meanwhile, the specter of artificial intelligence hangs over the case, threatening to invalidate any proposed solution that fails to take into account how the entire search business model could change in the coming years. Hepner said the court could consider solutions such as requiring Google to open up access to its large language model (LLM).

DOJ Antitrust Division Chief Jonathan Kanter wouldn’t comment specifically on what remedies the department would seek, beyond saying they “must be forward-looking” to address issues like AI. But he has previously said the division “will seek structural remedies in our conduct cases whenever possible,” meaning severances rather than orders to change certain behaviors. If the DOJ comes up with 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 be as significant, if not more so, than the Microsoft antitrust case of 23 years ago,” Stoppelman wrote. “That decision ushered in an era of unprecedented innovation that allowed promising startups, including Google, to flourish. It’s exciting to imagine the new technologies and innovations that will emerge as a result of this ruling over the next decade and beyond.”