On the Google Antitrust Case
Getting rid of a monopoly, but at what cost?
It was recently announced that the U.S. Justice Department is filing action against Google for monopoly concerns. Here’s David McCabe and Nico Grant for The New York Times:
The Justice Department has accused Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., of illegally using partnerships with phone makers and internet browser companies to shut out rival search engines.
Thanks to agreements with companies like Apple, Samsung and Mozilla, Google has been the default search engine when billions of web users open a browser on their phones, tablets and personal computers. The government has argued that Google’s multibillion-dollar payouts to partners have prevented other search engines like Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo from accumulating a meaningful share of the online search market.
The Justice Department also claims Google’s practice of preloading its services on devices that use its Android software illegally helped the internet company maintain a monopoly.
As U.S. et al. v. Google goes to trial this week, the echoes of the landmark federal suit against Microsoft, a quarter-century ago, are unmistakable. In the Google case, as with Microsoft then, a tech giant is accused of using its overwhelming market power to unfairly cut competitors off from potential customers.
After having some time to collect my thoughts on this case and the possible ramifications of legislation that could come from it, I have some concerns.
Google, at least for some very brief time in the early 2000s, did do the ‘free market thing’ of simply making the better product in Search. But those days have long passed. It’s undeniable that there isn’t a lot of competition going on here:
The argument from the Justice Department for how Google achieved this is twofold: (1) Google signed a massive pool of deals with web browser companies to gain users. (2) Google’s larger pool of user data from being the default let them consistently deliver higher quality results to users. Therefore, it became impossible for competitors to build an equally competent product.
They also point to the fact that it takes at most four taps to change to another search engine, yet people always choose Google.
I’m something of a rare user. Prior to the recent developments of generative AI, I used DuckDuckGo, the popular privacy-friendly search engine, as my main because their page loads faster and I’d rather not have a direct extrapolation of the thoughts in my head compiled into a dossier.
But DuckDuckGo’s result quality sucks. And Microsoft Bing, Google’s closest competitor, who is just as privacy invasive, somehow manages to give worse results than DuckDuckGo.
This case is correct in that no other companies can compete in the way the market is currently set up.
Now enter the last decade. If search engine competition is not possible, maybe search engine speciation is. Search bars exist everywhere. And Google isn’t the only one who has made a good one.
Let’s look at what I get when I Google “google antitrust trial”
And search the same query on TikTok:
Or Microsoft Bing’s recent GPT-4 powered Chat mode:
Each of these has something unique to offer me. Google offers the most high-quality sources, frontlining The New York Times in all three categories: News, Perspectives, and the old-fashioned results. This is a very interesting choice. I at first assumed that Google had personalized the results for me, knowing that I am a chronic NYT reader. I checked: searching the same term over anonymous browser Tor gave me the same result.
NYT, along with four of the seven sites in the News section at the top have paywalls. On the one hand, the quality in terms of raw factuality of the services Google overwhelmingly promotes like NYT, Wired, WaPo, WSJ, etc. is consistently higher than any other service in the world. On the other hand, it makes information highly inaccessible when the majority of people don’t have a PhD in circumventing these paywalls. Their only option that isn’t paywalled is Wikipedia, whom they have received criticism for over-relying on.
Let’s evaluate their newer competition…
TikTok offers the most excellent visual answers, as well as quick explainers. According to Google’s own claims, a high fraction of people, particularly young ones, are more likely to turn to TikTok and Instagram than Google Search because of the more digestible design. One thing I like about TikTok’s search feature is that it obviously gives a boost to legacy media institutions, but it weaves them between random users. which gives someone who just spends one minute scrolling a variety of perspectives. But TikTok has obviously very large limitations in regard to the sort of answers that are actually useful, as well as the fact that they severely punish creators who use links, making a good portion of search queries serve useless results on TikTok.
Generative AI-based search solutions take the cake for an actual proper search replacement. Bing Chat is the best of these tools for the moment. It gives excellent answers with a medium to high degree of factuality and offers easy links to check its thinking.
Since I know most readers of Humanlike are the people who use these tools daily anyway, I won’t dwell on all of the great things about Generative AI in search. But the important thing is competition, and right now Google may have the worst product in the field.
I’ve tried Google’s Search Generative Experience, which about 40% of the time just will not give you an answer. And when it does, it’s often unrelated or unhelpful. Google also has Bard, which is similarly low in factuality.
For the first time in at least a decade and a half, Google’s #1 product has some signs of competition on the horizon, and this happens to be the time that the Justice Department’s long-planned case goes into litigation. How ironic.
And now I want to talk about the defaults argument. With the massive exception of Microsoft Windows, almost every consumer electronic device that can access a browser today uses Google’s Search by default.
Take a look at what browsers people use:
You may at first think that Google can proudly say that they own 64.1% of the browser market share. Wrong. Putting Apple’s Safari aside for a moment as it does not work on the overwhelming majority of the devices in the world, every popular browser beside Firefox runs on a Chromium base, which Google owns and controls.
This gives Google outrageously large control over how people view the internet. They can and have pushed obnoxious controlling norms of how the internet can work such as Manifest V3, which theoretically removes the capability to add custom privacy and ad filtering, as well as Web Integrity API, which theoretically normalizes limits the amount of customization users and developers can put on their browsers. These changes range from walked back to half-implemented, but they serve as precedent of Google using it’s power to attempt to push absurd rules over the web. And sure, developers and users can modify Chromium to remove these awful changes, and they do, but Google controlling how it works by default means that web developers will cater to whatever the majority of people use, and most users will have far less agency in what conditions they internet.
So the one competition to literally every non-Apple device in the world exclusively running Chromium is Firefox. Firefox… owned by Mozilla… who receives 90% of its funding from Google in exchange for being the default search engine. Google’s only browser competitor could not exist without their funding.
But I thought search default deals were anti-competitive? Now we are in interesting territory. Search deals give Google tremendous control of the search market. Getting rid of search deals gives Google entire control of the browser market. Google has a “100% default” situation on all devices, where the two situations where competition exists is at most half competition: Google controls the default search engine of Safari and Firefox while not controlling the browser, and in the opposite, Google controls the browser of Microsoft Edge while not controlling the default search engine. And any attempt to regulate this situation will only make it worse. Catch-22.
Assuming regulation removed Google’s ability to do search default deals, literally the only way to have a fully non-Google web browsing experience would be on an Apple device running Safari with altered settings. This would be very bad.
But what if this regulation could make the situation so much worse? The regulators’ war against the Google default will also have profound impacts on arguably the most important piece of software in the world: Android.
Android in 2023 is a contradiction. On the one hand, it’s doing quite well:
On the other:
87% of [American] teens own an iPhone and 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone
What on earth, as a regulator, do you do when confronted with THIS information? The demographic that creates consumption habits for the rest of the world is at war with the highly consumed product and it’s YOUR job to decide if it’s too powerful.
In the argument of the antitrust case, Google’s rise to power was furthered by its use of Android’s defaults, by insisting that OEMs sell phones with their suite of apps installed in all markets outside of China.
A theoretical regulation that restricts Google’s ability to control OEM defaults on Android could have disastrous consequences for Android. Currently Google makes a massive amount of revenue from services like Play Store, Google Pay, and the advertising data harvested from users’ phones without consent.
So waaaa waaaaaaa one of the biggest corporations in the world wouldn’t make as much money. What’s the big deal?
If Google doesn’t continue to make tremendous profits off their open-sourced approach to Android, they will move (the already lackluster) development resources on Android to their own proprietary Pixel line of Android phones.
This would mean a few things: The base Android experience would weaken, making the already high barrier to entry for Android OEMs significantly higher, as each company would have to build more tech that competes with Google because they can’t rely on Google to do the software work for them. That would certainly mean more in the direction of a Pixel-Samsung duopoly, and pretty much every other OEM dropping out as they would have to massively upscale costs to create their own software suite a decade behind. Less competition and new ideas, which were previously the only strength of Android.
And it would likely mean literally zero in user privacy from Google, as every user would have to have Google services to use, for example, a navigation app because all Android mapping apps (Google Maps, Waze, that’s it) are owned by Google.
Assuming regulation preventing Google’s default deals passed, Apple would see massive gains. Google and other companies that give consumers choice would be wiped out.
We need tech regulation, but not this.