The Google Search Antitrust Case: A High-Tensor, High-Dimensional District Judge Amit Mehta

In antitrust trials, we are 0 for 2. United States District judge Amit Mehta ruled on Monday that Google has unlawfully maintained its dominance in search by using anticompetitive deals to keep rivals from gaining traction. He said that, without fear of pressure from competitors, Google has been able to charge whatever it wants.

Over the past 26 years, the search business has become a $175 billion annual revenue giant that accounts for much of parent company Alphabet’s profits. As it may lose its prominent placement on phones and other gateway to the web, Google will appeal.

The decision was called an historic win by the Attorney General. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter said it “paves the path for innovation for generations to come.”

The increased oversight of the tech industry under Donald Trump was the basis for the case before Mehta. It was the first case against Big Tech companies to go to trial after Trump left office.

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. There is more than one hundred pages of findings of fact and conclusions of law, along with a 286-page document filled with footnotes, redactions and an illustrative graphic of a search result for golfing shorts.

In addition to Apple, Google also has contracts with cell carriers and device manufacturers to be the default search engine on Android devices (these contracts operate a little differently since they hinge on Google’s control of the Google Play Store).

Google vs Apple: Is Google the Only Game in the World? Apple, Google, and the Future of Google’s Search Engine

“I don’t believe that Microsoft could offer a price in the world that we can afford,” she said. They offered to give us Bing at no cost. They could give us the whole company.

Google and Apple entered into their present contract in 2016. Their dealings date even further back, but around that time, Apple started to roll out Suggestions. (Think, for example, when you type something out into Spotlight and Apple suggests a website to you — that’s not the same as Google Search.)

(Of course, Cue’s opinion doesn’t mean Bing is objectively bad. Elsewhere, the opinion notes that Bing’s search quality is comparable to Google’s on desktop, though it falls behind on mobile.)

All of these companies recognize Google as the only game in town, and not just because they refuse to give Bing the time of day. None of theseFortune 500 companies have any choice in regards to the matter.

The opinion states that Apple gets at least a 20% of its net ad revenue from Google, if it returns for only exclusive and non-exclusive default placements.

This was significant. It was estimated that a query loss of 10% of traffic to the website and revenue lost of 4% of revenue based on Apple Suggestions. The new 2016 contract says that Apple should remain similar to prior implementations so that they can not expand as far as they please.

Both companies seem to agree with the terms of the 2016 contract. Google and Apple extended the agreement in 2021: the contract will expire in 2026. Apple “can unilaterally extend the agreement by two years,” and if both parties agree, they can extend the contract even further, all the way out to 2031. Part of the contract obligates both Google and Apple to defend this agreement “in response to regulatory actions” (e.g., DOJ antitrust lawsuits, like this one).

It would cost Apple $6 billion annually to run a GSE, which includes developing its search capability, according to the calculation. In the late 1960’s, in order for Apple to compete with the internet giant, it had to create a GSE. Apple would have to spend something “in the rough order of” $20 billion in order “to reproduce [Google’s technical] infrastructure dedicated to search.”

First off, United States v. Google draws a distinction between general search engines (GSEs) and specialized vertical providers (SVPs). The heavy use of technical jargon can make your eyes water, but the idea is very simple. A GSE is a search engine in the sense that everyone understands it — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and so on.

If you get really galaxy-brained about it, there are thousands of little “search” boxes all over the internet. Sometimes you even use them in a similar way to Google Search — say, for example, to look for cheap flights to a specific destination or to buy a pair of black flared leggings. Booking.com and Amazon.com are not the same as a general search engine that searches the World Wide Web. Do you, an ordinary person, need to logically justify this gut reaction? No. A court of law has already done it for you, in a lot of words that aren’t needed to be read.

It was just so much for the senior citizen. But the little search bar on social media platforms, like TikTok, operates slightly differently — at least in terms of user behavior and certainly in terms of whether Google views certain companies as competitive threats. Apparently in 2021, Google conducted research into “younger users.” According to their findings, among participants between the ages of 18-21 who use TikTok daily, at least one in four reported using it as a search engine.

The internet habits of zoomers aren’t relevant information for Mehta. “Imagine if Google’s search quality substantially degraded, whether purposely or through neglect,” he writes. Have you thought about it, imagine? Who. Could. Imagine. That.) “Would SVPs or social media platforms be able to shift resources to put out a product that resembles a GSE and thereby capture a significant number of dissatisfied Google users? The answer is no. It would take “extraordinary cost and expense” for even a juggernaut like Amazon or Meta to fill that hole in the market.

Maybe AI search is the future, but the future is not here yet — at least, not in a way that’s relevant to antitrust law. The judge writes that search may someday be fundamentally altered by the technology, but it will not happen soon. Elsewhere, he writes that “[c]urrently, AI cannot replace the fundamental building blocks of search, including web crawling, indexing, and ranking.”

He discovered that generative Artificial Intelligence hasn’t eliminated the need for user data to deliver quality search results. The opinion’s findings of fact quote Neeva’s cofounder Sridhar Ramaswamy, saying that “the middle problem of figuring out what are the most relevant pages for a given query in a given context still benefits enormously from query click information. Artificial intelligence models don’t eliminate that need or replace it.

When you search for golf- shorts on a website, it’s more than just that you get a result, it’s also that you get important information about what the results are and what you should be looking for. It is not happening with the feedback loops that are being introduced with artificial intelligence.

It is important for the search giant to continue to have an infrastructure that understands the traditional ranking system, according to the opinion. There isn’t a reason for us to have turned our ranking over to these systems. We still have control over what’s happening and understandability.