What do you think about the fact that GOOGLE is a monopolist?
How long is the opinion in the case of a grand jury ruling in the Instance of the Constitutional Inquiry into the Establishment of Claims?
The opinion in the case is very long. Judge Mehta had to make factual findings as well as legal findings because this was a bench trial. So, there are over a hundred pages of findings of fact and even more of conclusions of law, adding up to a 286-page document replete with footnotes, redactions, and even an illustrative graphic of a search result for “golf-shorts” (which, apparently, came up a lot at trial).
Mehta will get to hear from both the experts and written testimony before deciding on the severity of the penalty. It’s not known how long the exact timeline is. The process may last into the end of 2024, according to a man who used to chair the Federal Trade Commission and is currently a professor at George Washington University.
A fight that could take up to a year is predicted by an antitrust professor. Allensworth says the gnashing of teeth over the remedy will make it take a long time.
Kovacic tells The Verge that we could see a Supreme Court decision by the end of 2026. Other schedules are less optimistic; George Hay, a Cornell University law professor, gave The Associated Press a timeline of up to five years.
Apple’s Safari Default Search Engine is Google’s Only Game in Town, but Apple Can Easily Extending the Agreement by 2026
Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine in Safari. But according to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, there’s no other meaningful alternative. During the trial, he said that “there’s no price that Microsoft could ever offer” to Apple to get the company to preload Bing in Safari.
At one point, he said that he did not believe Microsoft could offer a price that would make us want to use it. “They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company.”
(Of course, Cue’s opinion doesn’t mean Bing is objectively bad. The opinion notes that Bing is comparable togoogle on desktop, but falls behind on mobile.
It’s not just Eddy Cue refusing to give Bing the time of day — all of these companies recognize Google as the only game in town. None of theFortune 500 companies have a real choice in this matter.
According to the opinion, “[i]n return for exclusive and non-exclusive default placements (i.e., user-downloaded Chrome and Safari default bookmarks), Google pays Apple a [redacted] percentage of its net ad revenue, which amounted to $20 billion in 2022.”
The contract between Apple and Google was entered in the year of 2016 Their dealings date way further back, but around then, Apple rolled out Suggestions. If you type in something into Spotlight and Apple suggests a website to you, that isn’t the same thing as searching on the internet.
This was significant. One Google analysis estimated “a query loss of 10–15% of Safari traffic and a revenue loss of 4–10% of iOS Safari revenue based on Apple Suggestions.” The new 2016 contract includes a specification that “Apple’s implementation of the Safari default must ‘remain substantially similar’ to prior implementations” so that Apple “could not expand farther than what they were doing,” lest Apple “bleed off traffic.”
The 2016 contract seems to have worked out well for both companies. Google and Apple extended the agreement in 2021: the contract will expire in 2026. Apple “can unilaterally extend the agreement by two years,” and if both parties agree, they can extend the contract even further, all the way out to 2031. Part of the contract obligates both Google and Apple to defend this agreement “in response to regulatory actions” (e.g., DOJ antitrust lawsuits, like this one).
It would cost 6 billion dollars annually to run a GSE, on top of the already spent development of search capabilities, according to Apple. Meanwhile, in “late 2020, Google estimated how much it would cost Apple to create and maintain a GSE that could compete with Google.” To reproduce the technical infrastructure devoted to search, Apple would need to spend something in the rough order of $20 billion.
A distinction is drawn between general search engines and specialized vertical providers. The heavy use of technical acronyms makes your eyes water, but it’s actually quite simple. A GSE is a search engine in the sense that everyone understands it — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and so on.
There are thousands of little boxes on the internet if you’re really into it. Sometimes you even use them in a similar way to Google Search — say, for example, to look for cheap flights to a specific destination or to buy a pair of black flared leggings. Booking.com and Amazon.com are not the same as a general search engine that index the World Wide Web. Do you, an ordinary person, need to logically justify this gut reaction? Definitely not. It has just been done for you by a court of law in a ton of words.
Nevertheless, says Judge Amit Mehta, social media platforms are distinct — they’re walled gardens of content. And more importantly, “there is little evidence that they actually compete with GSEs for search queries.” He says the TikTok study doesn’t think about whether the platform’s search quality results are competitive with the rest of the world. And TikTok is not the only social platform. One study, he says, suggests that Facebook use corresponds with an uptick in Google Search use.
For Mehta, when it comes to an antitrust analysis, the internet habits of Zoomers are not relevant information. “Imagine if Google’s search quality substantially degraded, whether purposely or through neglect,” he writes. (Yes, imagine. Who. Could. Imagine. That.) Wouldn’t it be possible for social media platform to shift their resources to put out a product that looks similar to a GSE and capture a large number of dissatisfied Google users? The answer is no. It would take “extraordinary cost and expense” for even a juggernaut like Amazon or Meta to fill that hole in the market.
It is not relevant to antitrust law to see the future with Artificial Intelligence as it is, even if it is the future. The judge says that artificial intelligence may one day change search, but it will not be soon. Elsewhere, he writes that “[c]urrently, AI cannot replace the fundamental building blocks of search, including web crawling, indexing, and ranking.”
He found that even though artificial intelligence was used, the need for user data remained to deliver quality search results. The opinion’s findings of fact quote Neeva’s cofounder Sridhar Ramaswamy, saying that “the middle problem of figuring out what are the most relevant pages for a given query in a given context still benefits enormously from query click information. It’s not the case that the models eliminate a need.
In other words, when you search for “golf-shorts,” it’s not just that you get served (hopefully) with the relevant results for golf-shorts — Google more or less automatically receives important information about what you think the relevant results are, based on what pages you end up clicking on. That feedback loop isn’t happening with AI chatbots.
According to the opinion, a VP of search for the company, Pandu Nayak, said that it was vital for the company to continue to have an infrastructure that understands the traditional ranking system. According to Nayak, “there is no sense in which we have turned over our ranking to these systems. We still exercise a modicum of control over what is happening and an understandability there.”
Apparently in 2020, Google conducted a study looking to see what would happen to its bottom line if it “were to significantly reduce the quality of its search product.” The conclusion was even if the company made search shittier, the revenues from Search would be fine.
The jurist could change the experience by forcing users to use their default search provider. He might be able to force Google to sell off parts of it’s business. It could be years before the search giant must comply with Mehta’s decision, as he scheduled a hearing for September to begin the process of deciding the penalties.
Though legal and economics experts say it’s difficult to guess where Mehta might land with his remedies, they have some ideas of what he might be considering. Here are five options.
US courts have been trying to resolve antitrust violations by ordering an end to illegal behavior, setting rules to prevent it from recurring, and taking other measures to ensure that the culprits and their competitors are moved onto an even field.
Comment on Modifications of Google’s Google search engine”, by Mehta’s [Am. J. Phys. Lett. 89 (2001) 337–338]
Mehta could follow the lead of the European Union, which for years has required Google to offer a menu of search options on Android devices, and recently expanded the rule to the Chrome browser.