Last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted its remedies request to U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in U.S. v. Google. In August, the Court ruled against Google, saying that the company’s deal with Apple to default to Google Search on mobile devices and web browsers, a standard business practice across industries, was anticompetitive. While this ruling was misguided, the extreme remedies the DOJ is seeking go far beyond the Court’s verdict—the Biden administration’s last shot at reshaping the American economy in a progressive mold, with little regard for the consequences to consumers.
It’s worth considering how customers view Google’s products and services since antitrust law is supposed to be based on demonstrable instances of consumer harm. In its 2024 Most Trusted Brands report, Google ranked third. On TIME’s list of the Best Companies of 2024, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, came in at 25th in the world. In his opinion, Judge Mehta made multiple acknowledgements that Google has developed superior products through decades of relentless investment and innovation.
Americans love Google and the low cost and high quality services it provides them. However, since the Biden administration took over this lawsuit, it has focused on the difficulties Google creates for rival businesses—not consumers—by competing efficiently in the marketplace. The DOJ’s requested remedies, if approved by the Court, will apply blunt force trauma where a tweak would suffice. But referees safeguard competition by ensuring the rules apply equally to all players, not by deliberately hobbling the leader. Most understand that tying one of Michael Jordan’s or Tom Brady’s hands behind their back wouldn’t have made the other players around them better. The DOJ’s proposed remedies pay little regard to this basic logic, and such an approach is not only a major departure from prevailing precedent but also ought to offend Americans’ sense of fairness.
The DOJ’s requested remedies, if approved by the Court, will apply blunt force trauma where a tweak would suffice.
Recall that the core of this case was all about Google’s default search deals. Google paid device makers and web browser providers to be the default search engine for those products. Such deals exist throughout the broader economy. Coca-Cola and McDonald’s have an exclusive agreement. Producers pay slotting fees to retailers to get better placement on store shelves. Certain video games are exclusively available on one type of console. The examples go on and on. However, the DOJ’s proposed remedies would prevent and punish this same practice between Google and Apple.
To start, the DOJ asks for the court to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser immediately. Yet Chrome has almost nothing to do with the underlying case, which again is about Google’s placement on Apple’s Safari and other browsers. Forcing the sale of Chrome, by far the most popular web browser due to its consistent high ratings, would likely just degrade or even eliminate it as an option for consumers. This is because the companies that could afford to buy Chrome, such as Microsoft and Apple, already have their own browsers. Further, a standalone, free browser is unsustainable without the revenue from the kind of deals that the DOJ wants to prevent, which is why Mozilla, the provider of the Firefox browser, has condemned the DOJ’s remedies.
The DOJ has also asked the court to force Google to spin off its Android operating system after five years if competition in their defined search marketplace does not improve to the government’s liking. Once again, there’s no conceivable benefit to consumers underlying this request. It’s difficult to imagine that an Android detached from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be a more formidable competitor. With Android, Google provides significant competition and consumer choice in the mobile device market, where the DOJ is simultaneously arguing an antitrust case against Apple. It strains credulity to argue in separate court rooms both that Apple has too much power and that its greatest competitor is also too big. The courts shouldn’t let the DOJ have its cake and eat it, too.
Once again, there’s no conceivable benefit to consumers underlying this request…The courts shouldn’t let the DOJ have its cake and eat it, too.
The stipulation attached to a potential Android divestiture also demonstrates the Biden administration’s antipathy to competition and consumers by creating a perverse incentive for Google to degrade its core service. As mentioned, even Judge Mehta has acknowledged that Google reached its market-leader status not through anticompetitive means, but by relentlessly innovating and competing. It holds that if Google hopes to maintain ownership of Android, it probably ought to reduce investment and innovation in search. So either Google Search gets worse, or Android gets spun off into a weaker competitive position. The only guarantee is that consumers will lose.
The DOJ would likely say they have an answer for this problem elsewhere in the proposed remedies, demanding that Google share consumer and advertiser data with competitors. First off, the privacy issues here are obvious. It is beyond reckless for the government to demand Google hand over data its consumers have entrusted to them to anyone who asks. And here, again, the DOJ is far too concerned with bolstering or creating a quantity of competitors versus the quality of competition. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, regardless of the default deals at the heart of this case, consumers have actively chosen Google’s products and services because they like them better. Letting another company free-ride on Google’s investment and trust built with its users reduces incentives to innovate across the industry while eroding privacy.
It is beyond reckless for the government to demand Google hand over data its consumers have entrusted to them to anyone who asks
Similar issues of blunted competition appear in the rest of the DOJ’s requests. Under the framework, the government would prevent Google from creating or acquiring new search engines, including AI-based search products. The DOJ argues this stops Google from getting stronger, but in the real world, all this accomplishes is stopping new products and companies from ever getting started.
New companies trying to compete need resources to grow, yet the government keeps limiting these opportunities. Due to increased regulation, companies raising capital via IPOs are doing so at later and larger points. With regulation pushing IPOs beyond most early investors’ horizons, mergers and acquisitions are critical to generating initial investment as they provide the most realistic path for start-up investors to earn a return. Without realistic exit strategies, investors don’t invest. Far from increasing competition, forbidding one of the largest potential merger partners related to AI and search from making acquisitions (Google) will have an enormous chilling effect on new market entrants and potential competitors. This not only harms competition domestically to the detriment of consumers, but it has the inauspicious knock-on effect of harming America’s ability to compete against global rivals in the burgeoning AI sector.
With every one of the Biden DOJ’s demands of Google, there are painfully obvious problems and perverse incentives beyond the fact that virtually none of these remedies relate to the core conduct claimed in the case itself. So overtly outlandish are the DOJ’s remedies that even those that agreed with the court’s findings against Google have criticized them as “extreme, premature, and unrealistic,” and “an attempt to regulate how the internet works by people who do not understand how the internet works.” As Google appeals the underlying case, it’s important to recognize just how detached from reality and norms the Biden DOJ has revealed to be through its aggressive demands.
Image generated by NetChoice using ChatGPT’s DALL-E.