A federal judge said Monday that Google broke the law to kneecap competition in web search in ways that entrenched the company’s power.
It was the second time in the past year that a judge or jury had declared Google an illegal monopoly. The previous time was over how Google runs its Android app store.
The next steps, which involve proposing legal fixes to undo Google’s behavior, are essentially about imagining an alternative future in which Google isn’t Google as we know it.
What new ideas could flourish, which new companies might get off the ground or what products might be cheaper if Google were handcuffed from flexing its monopoly power over search?
We have the internet we have, and it’s hard to imagine something different or if you’d like it more. I’ve sketched out six changes that could result from the two monopoly rulings on Google.
This is educated speculation. It’s also possible that not much will really change. That’s what happened after Google was found to have broken the European Union’s anti-monopoly laws.
The U.S. government must now propose to Judge Amit Mehta ways to restrain Google’s actions to fix its monopoly. It could take years to resolve. In the app store case, a judge will soon decide how Google must change its illegal status quo.
Google said it plans to appeal Monday’s ruling and is “focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.” A spokesman for Google declined to discuss speculation about what happens next.
1. Imagine a Google-quality search engine but without ads — or one tailored to children, news junkies or Lego fans.
It’s possible that Google could be forced to let other companies access its search technology or its essential data to create search engines with the technical chops of Google — but without Google.
You might imagine that a company takes Google’s secret sauce and tweaks it to make a kid-friendly search engine, suggested Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project and a frequent critic of Big Tech power. Another company could prioritize websites that look out for your privacy. Another might show searches in a visual-first way.
“We’re going to see the innovation of mankind come out,” Stoller said.
Letting a thousand Google-type search engines bloom is probably the idea that Google critics have embraced the most. But even if the government asks for it and Mehta agrees, it might not work.
There have been, and are, other search engines, including Microsoft’s Bing, the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo and Neeva, started by a former senior Google executive. DuckDuckGo and Bing are nowhere near as popular or as lucrative as Google. Neeva was little used and shut down this year.
The question that we could see tested is: If Google is forced to share the search prowess that the judge said it gained illegally, could rivals make more appealing search engines?
2. Would Apple create a search engine?
Google pays Apple many billions of dollars a year— $20 billion in 2022 — to make Google the standard way to search the web on Apple’s Safari browser.
That arrangement gives Google access to valuable searches from Apple device owners, and it guarantees Apple gobs of money.
Megan Gray, an antitrust law specialist with GrayMatters Law & Policy and a critic of Google’s power, said the judge could significantly change or end Google’s deals with Apple and companies that put Google search front-and-center on Android phones and web browsers.
The likeliest scenario is you’d need to pick whether to use Google on your iPhone or something else. But technologists and stock analysts have also speculated for years that Apple could make its own search engine. It would be like when Apple started Apple Maps as an alternative to Google Maps.
Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.
3. Could prices go down for the products that advertise next to your searches (which is most products)?
Mehta said Google has the power to charge artificially high prices for the text ads you might see when you search for terms like “auto insurance quotes Minneapolis.”
In theory, if alternative search engines get popular, there would be more competition and lower prices for the insurance providers and other companies trying to grab your attention when you search.
And again, in theory, if they pay less for advertising, car insurance and other products you buy could be cheaper.
4. The company could break up into Baby Googles.
This one seems unlikely, but the government could ask the judge to split Google into parts to fix its illegal monopoly power. In this scenario, the Chrome browser might be its own company and so might Google search and Android, for example.
Stoller said that when corporations such as Standard Oil and AT&T have been forced to split up in past illegal-monopoly rulings, the component companies were liberated to come up with clever ideas that didn’t have a chance inside the giant corporation.
5. What if Google weren’t allowed to know so much about you?
Jason Kint, chief executive of online news lobbying group Digital Content Next, said Google’s multiple products should no longer be allowed to commingle information about what you do. It would essentially be a divorce of Google’s products without breaking the company up.
That could mean, for example, that whatever you did on your Android phone or the websites you visit using Chrome would not feed into one giant Google repository about your activities and interests.
If Google had less information, it could be better for your privacy, and it might help other companies, including news organizations that don’t have Google’s wealth of data.
6. You might be able to download almost anything from Google’s Android app store.
The judge in the other Google monopoly case has seemed receptive to loosening the company’s absolute power over apps.
That might mean that you would be able to buy an Amazon Kindle e-book from its Android app, which you can’t do now. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Games such as “Fortnite” that have been absent from Android phones might be available, too.
In a recent court hearing, the judge also seemed open to cutting the fees that Google collects when you buy digital subscriptions to things like Disney Plus, Match.com or X from Android apps. That could translate into lower prices for things you buy in apps.