Google has been brought to court by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) over its contracts with Apple and other smartphone manufacturers to be the default search engine on their devices. In this unfolding landmark antitrust case, we may find out how governments measure up to the sheer size of tech corporations, and how equipped they are to regulate this market.
Case summary
In August 2024, Google lost a case brought by the Department of Justice over its monopoly in the search engine market. Federal District Court Judge Amit Mehta sustained the charge that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly” in the general search engine market.
According to the judge’s decision, Google’s de facto monopoly was not earned by providing the best search engine, but by “purchasing favourable positions on all the relevant distribution platforms through which consumers could access search engines,” including a $20 billion contract with Apple in 2022 to be the default search engine on the Safari browser. The exclusive nature of these contracts enabled Google to cash in ad revenue from search without any meaningful competition.
Proposed solutions
In April 2025, solutions to breaking up Google’s monopoly will be heard in court. Google still plans to appeal Judge Mehta’s decision.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, proposed loosening the exclusive contracts with Apple (and other providers) to set Google as the default search engine on new devices.
The DOJ, on the other hand, is pushing Google to sell its Chrome browser and potentially the Android mobile operating system. Google is appealing to the logic of free market capitalism to avoid selling Chrome, calling the government’s proposal interventionist. Google also cautions against imposing antitrust remedies that chill innovation, and wants to focus on its distribution agreements with browser developers, mobile device manufacturers, and wireless carriers.
Judge Mehta maintains that such agreements are difficult to exit, “especially for Android manufacturers, which must agree to install Google Search in order to include Google’s Play Store on their devices.”
The company’s proposal is to make the agreements non-exclusive and, for Android phone manufacturers, to unbundle its Play Store from Chrome and Google Search. Browser developers that agree to set Google Search as the default would then be able to revisit that decision each year.
Kamyl Bazbaz, spokesperson for the search engine competitor DuckDuckGo, said Google’s proposal is insufficient to really challenge the monopolistic situation: “Once a court finds a violation of competition laws, the remedy must not only stop the illegal conduct and prevent its recurrence, but restore competition in the affected markets.”
The prosecutors’ proposal also asks Google to license its search results and technology to rivals. This aims to foster innovation in search: Judge Mehta found Google’s near-total market share prevents competitors from gathering enough data to improve their products at the same rate as Google itself.
What this means for search and the tech world
Tech companies have historically been difficult to regulate, for two main reasons. On the one hand, technological innovations have an entry barrier that prevents legislators and regulatory bodies from grasping the details, scale, and importance of certain issues. Indeed, without a specialised regulatory agency, ongoing regulation would be superficial at best, non-existent at worst. On the other hand, tech giants are overwhelmingly located in the US, which has been historically reluctant to regulate business in general, and tech businesses in particular. This case is extremely significant because it shows an effort stateside to regulate tech companies, which was previously absent.
This case may signify a shift where other tech companies, such as Amazon, might fall under similar scrutiny.
The search market has been dominated by Google for more than 15 years, and that is not likely to change in the near future. While Google’s contracts might be loosened so that browsers and device manufacturers will be able to provide more than one default search engine option, Google has become such a recognisable name and has had such a competitive advantage until now, that its search product will consistently be chosen as the default option by users and manufacturers.
However, if more parity in the market is achieved, competitors such as Bing and DuckDuckGo might be able to slowly catch up and become more popular.
Google has also received increased criticism in the last few years on the quality of its products. Last year, Ed Zitron highlighted how leaked internal Google emails reportedly show that in 2019, Prabhakar Raghavan took over Google Search to increase the number of searches. It was perhaps predictable that within Google’s business model, the number of searches would eventually plateau as the search algorithm became better and better, and thus more able to guess at people’s questions and answer them in fewer queries. However, this means a stable revenue as opposed to growth, as fewer searches will result in fewer displayed ads. Zitron maintains that Raghavan changed this business model by lowering the quality of the search algorithm, so that the number of searches would keep increasing.
It is yet unclear as to whether Google will take those criticisms into account, especially with the increasing introduction of AI Overviews. However, a decline in product quality from Google would potentially hasten a change on the part of users and manufacturers over which search engine to select as default on their devices.
Another antitrust case, brought to Google by the Department of Justice over the ad tech market, is also ongoing and will inform the shape that Google will take in the near future. The Competition and Markets Authority in the UK has also launched an investigation into Google, which we will see develop over the course of the year.
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