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THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT UNDER TWO PRESIDENTS asked the court to split off Google’s popular Chrome browser. Mehta acknowledges that the Google search default in Chrome “undoubtedly contributes to Google’s dominance in general search,” that a breakup wouldn’t destroy the company. But he decided against it in a series of loopy arguments. He says that some of Google’s dominance is because of its quality, which goes against his own ruling of maintaining market power. He says Google’s default status in Chrome is the problem rather than its ownership of Chrome, which presumes that Google might just give another search company the default on its own browser. And he says that divestiture would be “highly risky,” after Perplexity just offered $34.5 billion for Chrome.
The whole ruling is like this. Mehta inexplicably allows Google to continue to pay distributors, because it might hurt those companies to lose the proceeds. That includes companies like Apple, one of the richest on Earth, which simply must receive tens of billions of dollars every year so Google can entrench its monopoly. The only limits on these payments is that they have to be one-year terms, but of course they can be renewed.
The judge recognizes what this means. “Due to Google’s massive financial advantage and its superior monetization, distributors will be incentivized to stick with Google because it can pay more, thus leaving in place the very forces that ‘effectively [have made] the ecosystem exceptionally resist[ant] to change,’” he writes. The whole point of the case is that Google was found guilty trying to do this!
Mehta claims that as the best search engine, Google’s would earn default status anyway (then why did we hold this trial??), and that generative AI and therefore competition is just around the corner, and Google should not be prevented from competing with them (seriously). So Mehta refuses to take away the fruits of Google’s illegal conduct and the ability for Google to continue such conduct while reassuring that AI will solve the problem, even though elsewhere in the ruling he concedes that Google’s ill-gotten data advantage gives it a leg up in the AI race.
Other remedies Mehta rejected include a contingent divestment of the Android operating system, a “choice screen” for users to decide their search engine upon starting a device or browser (these actually don’t really work), more stringent sharing with advertisers and publishers, and no anti-retaliation, anti-circumvention, or self-preferencing provisions.
The bottom line is that, while the remedies imposed might help on the margins, Mehta allowed Google to get away with monopolization, and Google knows it can keep pushing the envelope of the law with no sanction. “It’s up to the Trump Justice Department and state attorneys general to appeal or risk emboldening even more lawbreaking by Big Tech monopolies,” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a statement.
But I find it highly unlikely that the Justice Department will do anything here. While assistant attorney general for antitrust Gail Slater said the department is “weighing our options,” Trump has been a handmaiden to Big Tech and has shown a willingness to interfere in antitrust enforcement. Just this week, the European Union pulled a fine against Google for violating the Digital Services Act after lobbying from the Trump administration. Trump has vowed to place tariffs on countries unless they remove all taxes and regulations from Big Tech. Do you really think he’s going to go after Google here?
Maybe the states will appeal; I hope they do. Maybe it will get overturned; it should. And maybe the other cases where Google has been found guilty of monopolization will reach legitimate verdicts; there’s reason to believe that will happen. But a lack of accountability has defined the last quarter-century in America, and Judge Mehta’s embarrassing ruling is the perfect embodiment of that. We talk about Trump subverting the rule of law in America, but in this case the law subverted itself.
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