Google faces tough antitrust motion from government

By Martín Becerra (UNQ and UBA professor, Conicet researcher).

The US government asked the judge hearing complaints of abuse by Google of its dominant position that the technology giant sell the Chrome browser, modify the operation of Android, end the exclusivity contracts with Apple and Samsung and share the data collected for decades from billions of users. The Googlesplaining manual counterattacks

Google has until 20 December to respond in court to the motion made by the US Department of Justice last Wednesday for the technology giant to sell the Chrome browser and that, to mitigate its dominant position, it modifies the preference that its own services have in the Android system or also sell it.

This is the most important antitrust case that the US Judiciary has been processing since the beginning of the 21st century. It was motivated by complaints from the Department of Justice in 2020, when Donald Trump was in power, and to which prosecutors from more than 30 states. The proposed measures, which Google parent Alphabet calls “drastic” and “extremely interventionist,” are subject to a decision by District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled last August that Google’s “anticompetitive behavior” “must stop” and that the omnipresent Google search engine has illegally exploited its dominance to distort competition and stifle innovation.

The government’s lawyers are also asking for a reorganization of Google’s business. Judge Mehta could prevent the conglomerate from continuing to sign exclusivity contracts with mobile equipment providers, such as Samsung and Apple, that make its search engine the default.

According to the US government, these agreements indirectly affect the final price paid by consumers on the wide range of products they buy and which, because they are advertised on Google’s search engine (where they appear as sponsored results), cost more than they would if there were real competition in the Internet search market. By raising the price of ads on the search engine, due to its monopolistic nature, they affect the consumer.

In addition, to enable competition in the monopolized market, the government wants Google to share the data it collects on users when determining what personalized results it shows them (and hides from them). A direct indicator of the dominant power in the digital economy, Google’s potential rivals cannot equalize the advantage it has accumulated over decades of extracting, storing and processing personal and public data, through which it has drawn profiles and behavioral patterns of its billions of user people and organizations. The algorithmic programming of Google’s products and services is fueled by this extraordinary accumulation of data that is impossible to match by any emerging company.

During Joe Biden’s term, the government supported the case with the accusation that Google «illegally monopolizes the advertising technologies that millions of websites and applications used to generate income.» It is an open question what will happen to the case from January 20, 2025, when Trump returns to the White House.

Googlesplaining

The government’s presentation was responded to in harsh terms by the conglomerate. Google’s president, Kent Walker, called the proposals “extreme”, “a radical interventionist program” and “wildly exaggerated.” In an explicit nod to Trump’s ideological program, Walker accused the Justice Department of “pushing a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technological leadership,” which is disputed by China.

According to Google, the changes proposed by the current government “would break a series of products, even beyond the search that people love and find useful in their daily lives.” As in other communiqués in googlesplaining format, Walker asserted that if the status quo dominated by his company were modified, the privacy and security of the users of its multiple services and applications would be put at risk.

In other words, for Google, the accusation is unfounded because users are free to choose another search engine. It claims that Alphabet’s products and services are better and that’s why they’re more successful. Googlesplaining avoids any reference to the market power achieved by the company and dilutes its effects by indicating that its dominant position is less than 90% of online searches, because the percentage omits all searches that are made within e-commerce platforms (Amazon, Mercado Libre or TripAdvisor), social digital networks such as TikTok or services such as Airbnb. Here Google has a point: methodologically, the universe of Internet searches is not limited to search engines alone.

But if the default installation of the search engine on devices were irrelevant, since users could easily circumvent it, why does Google spend 10 billion dollars a year to maintain this privilege?

In fact, on the first day of the trial, Judge Amit Mehta questioned Google’s lawyer, John Schmidtlein, on his claim that users can easily change search engines from their default settings, and asked him how often they did so. Google’s lawyer responded that they had no firm facts on that.

Google’s lawyers and lobbyists will have to redouble their efforts because Judge Metha could reach a resolution of the case within the next nine months. Even if Trump decides to tone down the lawsuit filed during his first term in office, the coalition of more than 30 states and territories represented by their attorneys general that joined the case is unlikely to do so.

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