The Department of Justice and search engine companies are fighting over monopoly issues

The Microsoft-Douglas-Dawley-York-Answers case and antitrust-related monopoly cases

It is a very big deal. It’s hard to overstate it,” she said. “It is at least as big a deal as the Microsoft case, which is the last big antitrust case that we had. And that was 25 years ago.”

That Microsoft case, which was filed in 1998, was about the company bundling its browser, Internet Explorer, with its Windows operating system. It nearly led to the company being split in two — but Microsoft and the DOJ settled.

Allensworth added that it’s also comparable to cases like the Justice Department’s 1906 Standard Oil case, which is widely considered the first major monopoly case. The court found that the oil conglomerate owned by Rockefeller was in violation of antitrust laws. Standard Oil was ordered to break up into around 40 different companies as a result.

Do You Need to Own a Main Gateway? Google’s Way of Taking a Back Seat on Search: a DOJ’s Analytical Response

It wants to remove the main gateway to search in favor of a start point for 35 percent of user queries. By one metric shown in the trial, Chrome has more than four billion users, and the government’s lawyers argued that it should be a separate entity altogether. Jonathan Sallet, a lawyer representing the states, argued it was a big get for everyone, even if it was not a self sufficient business. This kind of asset is rarely acquired by companies.

Schmidtlein pointed to the success of competitors’ AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, MetaAI, and Grok, as evidence that competition within this space is healthy and varied. It’s preposterous to think that distribution can’t be accomplished by a group of people. He said they have more distribution than anyone else.

This isn’t the only suit that the government is filing against Google: they are expected to file another one in 2023. A different judge ruled last week that the internet giant’s dominance of the online advertising industry violates US antitrust laws.

Major tech industry players are expected to be called by both sides over the next several weeks. According to court documents, that includes the CEO of the search engine competitor as well as the VP’s of Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, and ChatGTP.

The only fair thing to do at this time is to help competitors catch up toGoogle because it has built itself a nearly insurmountable lead through its illegal actions. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified during the original trial that the only way to build a great search engine is with a nearly unobtainable amount of search data — and that Google had made sure it was the only company with that data. Mehta’s early questions seem to suggest he thinks some of the data-sharing and licensing provisions would amount to a “structural remedy,” which requires a higher burden of proof. But there will be a lot of questions to come about how to make the fight fair.

In response, on Monday morning as she stood outside the courthouse, Gail Slater, the DOJ’s Assistant Attorney for the Antitrust Decision, replied, “You know what is dangerous? The threat Google presents to our freedom of speech” and the freedom of digital market innovation.

The government attorneys read from statements about an hour before the proceedings began. They did not take questions from the gathered media.

Do Search Engines Have a Monopole? The Case against Google in the DOJ’s Antitrust Civil Litigation Division: An Opening Statement

David Dahlquist, the acting deputy director of the DOJ’s antitrust civil litigation division, spoke for the government in opening statements. He laid out a list of demanding demands that the government wants to see implemented.

One of the key questions in this trial will be what a fair search market actually looks like. It would be ridiculous for the court to allow competitors to create their own search engines, since they wouldn’t have much extra work to do, since they were the best search engines.

This case marks the beginning of an end to the long love affair between the tech world and D.C. The tech industry was able to expand because of little regulatory control. Major tech companies like Meta, Amazon and Apple are facing federal lawsuits.

Meta is in the same courthouse where the remedies trial is taking place, and is also facing an antitrust case. Meta acted as a monopoly by acquiring rivals in order to beat them out as competitors according to the agency.

The DOJ is asking that if you buy a phone, you should get the default browser.

The government wants to go a step further to ensure any remedy prevents Google from establishing similar exclusive agreements for its generative AI products, like Gemini. Dahlquist said the rise of Google’s AI products could open up another field the company could dominate if it’s allowed to keep using exclusive contracts — and they want to prevent that from happening.

Over the past four years, the company has maintained that it has never acted as a monopoly and that changes are unnecessary. The company’s leaders have said its search product is superior to competitors’ — and that’s why it dominates the industry.

John E. Schmidtlein, a lawyer for Google, argued in opening statements that the DOJ’s list of remedies in this case is just a “wishlist for competitors,” and that it will enable them to get resources that took Google decades to develop.

Addressing the DOJ’s effort to prevent Google from including Gemini in future exclusive distribution agreements, Schmidtlein said that Gemini was not the subject of the antitrust case and the company does not hold a monopoly on AI products.

The two sides are far apart, but still have a lot of trial and negotiation left. Google, which plans to appeal the case in its entirety, thinks all will be fair as long as it’s easier to pick your own search engine. The government thinks that the current form of the search engine cannot be allowed to continue. Judge Mehta, who asked a number of questions about the precedent for some of these requests, seems to be continually calibrating his own tolerance for sweeping change. If an easy path to arrive at a middle ground that works for everyone is available, then it shouldn’t come up in court.

During the trial in 2023, the AI market came up only occasionally, but now it appears to be front and center for both sides. The DOJ’s proposed remedies are so severe, Dahlquist argued, because “Google is using the same strategy they did for search, and applying it to Gemini.” He said that the search market is very competitive, but that he didn’t think that the rise of ChatGP would convince the court that search is not competitive.

A lawyer for the US Department of Justice showed a slide at the beginning of his opening arguments that described a vicious cycle within search giant Google. It is possible for a company to get more search queries by paying billions of gallons of money to be the default search engine, thus it can give better results, thus it makes more money and thus it can afford more defaults. Google doesn’t really disagree with this assessment — but in it’s telling, that’s a virtuous cycle. As one way to describe it, is as the cycle that makes it so powerful. The DOJ believes it is a nightmare, because it believes that it has created a perfect system. The judge will make the final decision.