US v. Google: all the news from the search antitrust showdown

After winning a fight to get Google’s search business declared an unlawful monopoly, the Department of Justice has released its initial proposal for how it’s thinking about limiting Google’s dominance — including breaking up the company.

The government is asking Judge Amit Mehta for four different types of remedies to Google’s anticompetitive power in search engines. They include behavioral remedies, or changes to business practices, as well as structural remedies, which would break up Google. And they’re focused particularly on futureproofing the search industry for the rise of generative AI. While AI might not be a substitute for search engines, the DOJ warns, it “will likely become an important feature of the evolving search industry.” And it aims to prevent Google from using its power in the industry to regain unfair control.

Now that Judge Amit Mehta has found Google is a monopolist, lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company’s illegal behavior and restore competition to the market for search engines. In a new 32-page filing (included below), they said they are considering both “behavioral and structural remedies.“

That covers everything from applying a consent decree to keep an eye on the company’s behavior to forcing it to sell off parts of its business, such as Chrome, Android, or Google Play.

The Justice Department wants to learn more about Google’s AI strategy in order to determine what kinds of changes it will ask for to resolve Google’s monopoly in search.

The request came during a hearing on Friday in a federal court in Washington, DC, where Google and the DOJ met before Judge Amit Mehta, who recently ruled in favor of the DOJ and agreed that Google is an illegal monopolist. Mehta’s decision officially ended the first phase of the trial, which focused on whether Google is liable under antitrust law. Now the parties are moving onto the remedies phase, where the government will propose solutions to correct the illegal behavior and restore competition to the market.

Yelp, one of Google’s most persistent and outspoken rivals, has finally filed its own antitrust lawsuit against the search giant, less than a month after a federal judge ruled Google an illegal monopolist.

Yelp alleges that Google has created or preserved its monopoly in local search services by preferencing its own inferior vertical over competitors’, which Yelp says harmed competition and reduced the quality of local search services. Yelp claims that the way Google directs users toward its own local search vertical from its general search engine results page should be considered illegal tying of separate products to keep rivals from reaching scale.

Longtime Google rivals like Yelp and DuckDuckGo received a huge victory on Monday when a federal judge ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly. But their statements on the ruling expressed restraint. That’s because the work of restoring competition has just begun, and the judge has yet to decide what that work will include. With a lot of options on the table, Google’s competitors are pushing for changes they believe will help their businesses, which might be harder than it sounds.

“While we’re heartened by the decision, a strong remedy is critical,” Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote in a blog post after the ruling, referencing the new trial phase that will kick off in September.

Google might be having a big Pixel phone event next week, but this week the company had to reckon with a major loss to the Department of Justice, who found the company liable for violating US antitrust law.

Naturally we had to break the entire case down on The Vergecast. So Lauren Feiner, who covered the case, and Alex Heath, who has been reporting on the reactions from the tech world, joined Nilay and myself to cover the best bits of the judge’s decisions and try to figure out what this all means.

The opinion in the Google search antitrust case, published Monday, is extremely long. Because this was a bench trial, Judge Amit Mehta was on the hook to make factual findings as well as legal findings. 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). 

The ruling in United States v. Google is a lot to take in. Some of it was previously reported in the press over the course of the weekslong trial; but here, the judge has inadvertently compiled the trial’s greatest hits: catty quotes from executives, embarrassing internal studies, and a bunch of surprising deets about that multibillion-dollar contract that keeps Google the default search engine in Safari. 

A federal judge has ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the US. “The market reality is that Google is the only real choice” as the default search engine, Judge Amit Mehta said in his decision, and he determined it had gotten that way unfairly. It’s a ruling that could portend big changes for the company, but we yet don’t know how big, and we might not for years.

Mehta declared on Monday that Google was liable for violating antitrust laws, vindicating the Department of Justice and a coalition of states that sued the tech giant in 2020. The next step — deciding on remedies for its illegal conduct — begins next month. Both parties must submit a proposed schedule for remedy proceedings by September 4th and then appear at a status conference on September 6th.

A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” according to the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

The fate of Google’s search business is now in the hands of Judge Amit Mehta, as closing arguments concluded in the landmark trial on Friday.

The Department of Justice and plaintiff states made their last arguments Thursday on Google’s alleged anticompetitive conduct in the general search market, and on Friday focused on its allegedly illegal conduct in search advertising. Google was also under fire (separately) for failing to retain chat messages that the DOJ believes could have been relevant to the case. 

Google has not one but two Department of Justice antitrust trials this year — and the first one, over Google Search, is finally coming to a close. On Thursday, lawyers showed up at the district court in Washington, DC, for the first of two days of closing arguments in the bench trial before Judge Amit Mehta. 

This was the first tech anti-monopoly lawsuit the government had filed in two decades since US v. Microsoft. Its outcome directly affects one of the most valuable companies in the world. At this stage, the judge will only determine whether Google is liable for the antitrust charges brought against it. If so, there will be a separate proceeding to determine appropriate remedies. These could be court-ordered constraints on Google’s behavior or something as drastic as breaking up elements of its search business.

Google gives Apple a 36 percent cut of all search ad revenue that comes from Safari, according to University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy. Google had fought to keep the number confidential, but Bloomberg reports that Murphy shared the figure while testifying in Google’s defense today at the Google antitrust trial.

Google has long paid to be the default search engine in Safari and other browsers like Firefox, spending $26.3 billion in 2021 alone for the privilege. $18 billion of that went to Apple, but the specifics of where the number came from remained secret until now. Google has been trying to keep such details under wraps as the trial goes on, but bits and pieces have seeped out anyway. According to Bloomberg, Google lawyer John Schmidtlein “visibly cringed when Murphy said the number.” Google declined to comment in an email to The Verge; Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Not all Google searches make Google money. Google often says that it only shows ads on about 20 percent of queries, the ones it calls “commercial queries.” You can probably guess what qualifies. “US president in 1836” is not something you type when you’re about to buy something; neither is “facebook” because all you’re looking for is Facebook. But if you type in “best new car 2023” or “cheap flights to London” there are a lot of advertisers that would like to be the first thing you see, and there’s a lot of money for Google to be made in the process.

This week, during the US v. Google antitrust trial, we got a rare glimpse at a closely guarded secret: which search terms make the most money. The list is only for the week of September 22nd, 2018, and it is the list of top queries ordered by revenue and nothing else. Still, we’ve never seen anything quite like this before, and the list was only made public after long deliberations from Judge Amit Mehta, who has, over the course of the trial, begun to push both sides to be more public with information and data like this.

You might not expect an antitrust trial focused on Google’s overwhelming dominance in the year 2023 to spend a lot of time talking about Internet Explorer circa 2005. But you’d be wrong.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai spent a good chunk of Monday in a DC courtroom, testifying as part of the ongoing US v. Google antitrust trial. He stood at a podium instead of sitting (apparently he hurt his back), often with a magnifying glass in his hand, pushing his glasses up on his forehead as he squinted down at a binder full of exhibits. One exhibit proved particularly interesting: a letter from Google’s then-top lawyer David Drummond, sent on July 22nd, 2005, to Microsoft’s then-general counsel Brad Smith. 

In late 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai floated a bold idea to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Cook had just told Pichai he wanted to be “deep, deep partners, deeply connected where our services end and yours begin,” according to notes from the meeting. Pichai responded with a proposal: What if Apple preinstalled a Google Search app on every iOS device?

Exactly what that would have looked like — a full-blown app, a native widget, some reinvention of the Spotlight feature — is hard to say. But Pichai’s case to Apple, revealed during the CEO’s testimony in the US v. Google antitrust trial today, was simple. Google had seen that the Google app and widget were popular on Android and drove people to do more searching. More Google searches on Apple devices would mean more revenue for Apple, thanks to the two companies’ wildly lucrative search agreement. Everybody wins. Pichai even posited that Google would promise to maintain the built-in Google service for 20 years.

The US v. Google antitrust trial is about many things, but more than anything, it’s about the power of defaults. Even if it’s easy to switch browsers or platforms or search engines, the one that appears when you turn it on matters a lot. Google obviously agrees and has paid a staggering amount to make sure it is the default: testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.

That number, the sum total of all of Google’s search distribution deals, came out during the Justice Department’s cross-examination of Google’s search head, Prabhakar Raghavan. It was made public after a debate earlier in the week between the two sides and Judge Amit Mehta over whether the figure should be redacted. Mehta has begun to push for more openness in the trial in general, and this was one of the most significant new pieces of information to be shared openly.