A federal judge will almost certainly target Google’s multibillion dollar search engine deals with Apple and other companies as part of a way to remedy the tech empire’s illegal online search monopoly, antitrust experts said.
On Monday, Google and the Department of Justice began an expected three-week-long court battle in Washington, DC, that could result in a massive shake up of the $1.8 trillion tech behemoth.
US District Judge Amit Mehta will ultimately determine Google’s fate following the so-called remedies phase of the landmark case. Mehta ruled in August that Google violated US antitrust law in maintaining a monopoly with its online search business.
If the DOJ gets its way, Google could be forced to sell off its key Chrome web browser, end its exclusive deals with Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and others to make Google the default search engine on web browsers and smartphones, and share search data with rivals.
The DOJ also wants the court to force Google to break off its Android mobile operating system if the search market doesn’t experience an increase in competition through its sweeping proposed fixes.
Experts in antitrust law told Business Insider that Mehta will most likely rule for Google to end its multibillion dollar deals with companies, including Apple, to be the default search engine on their devices and browsers.
Chrome sell off would be ‘worst case scenario’
“The judge is almost certainly going to order Google to stop paying for exclusive default status,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a law professor at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University. “But I don’t think we know what exclusive default status means yet.”
Allensworth called it a “toss up” on whether the judge will force Google to divest Chrome. Requiring Google to sell off Chrome would be the “worst case scenario” for the company, said Allensworth.
“Divestiture remedies are seen as pretty strong medicine,” Allensworth said, adding that a break up remedy “isn’t very closely related to the behavior at issue in this case.”
No matter what, Allensworth said she believes there will be what’s called a behavioral remedy for Google, which would mean the judge will require Google to change how it arranges its contracts with distributors like Apple.
“I think we just don’t know exactly how that’s going to be designed,” she said.
Additionally, Allensworth said it would be very unlikely that the judge would order Google to divest both Chrome and Android.
Back in 2023, when the antitrust case went to trial, it was revealed in court that in 2021 Google paid companies more than $26 billion for the search placement deals. In 2022, Google paid Apple a whopping $20 billion to secure itself as the default search engine on the company’s Safari browser, the DOJ said.
At trial, the judge made a “big deal” about the fact that Google had paid Apple billions, “saying why would they do so if it didn’t lock users in,” said George Hay, a professor at Cornell Law School and former chief economist for the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
“He clearly believed that the payment had that effect,” Hay said, adding that eliminating the agreement “is the most straightforward way to try to set things right.”
The DOJ, he said, will likely argue that’s not enough, though.
Nicholas Reese, an adjunct professor at New York University, said that Google’s exclusivity deals with Apple and other companies “have been close to the smoking gun for DOJ and other critics because they allegedly show naked attempts to control the market and neutralize competition.”
Reese noted the DOJ “went big” in the remedies that it is seeking for Google, but said that getting them all would probably “surprise” the government.
“I would stop short of saying we will see every remedy sought by DOJ ordered, but I do believe it will be significant,” he said.
Hay told BI that by asking the judge for as much as it did, the DOJ is “inviting Google to confirm that something less draconian will work.”
“Google of course says it wants almost no remedy,” he said.
The judge is expected to issue his remedies ruling by the end of the summer. Google has vowed to appeal Mehta’s ruling in which he declared the tech giant a monopolist. It could be years before there’s a final outcome.
Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh told BI that the more drastic a remedy that gets imposed, “the more likely it’ll get reversed on appeal.”
Google’s lawyer called DOJ’s proposal a ‘wish list’ for rivals
In an opening statement on Monday, Google lawyer John Schmidtlein called the DOJ’s proposal of remedies “a wish list for competitors looking to get the benefits of Google’s extraordinary innovations and trade secrets that we’ve spent decades developing,” The New York Times reported.
Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland said the government’s proposal was “unnecessary and harmful” in a blog post ahead of the start of the hearing.
The DOJ’s proposal would make it more difficult for people to use Google search, “jeopardize” users’ privacy and security, and “hamstring” how the company develops AI, Mulholland wrote.
Justice Department lawyer David Dahlquist said in his opening statement on Monday that the court must prevent Google from using its search monopoly to dominate the AI market.
“This court’s remedy should be forward looking and not ignore what’s on the horizon,” Dahlquist said, the Times reported. “Google is using the same strategy that they did for search and now applying it” to its Gemini AI chatbot.
Google’s lawyer argued that Gemini rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is doing just fine.
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