Google’s Search Antitrust Remedies Have Clear Parallel to Earlier Tech Case
Brian Albrecht, ICLE Chief Economist, was recently quoted in The Adweek article discussing how the court’s remedies in the Google antitrust case, which stopped short of a breakup, were justified because there wasn’t enough evidence for a stronger structural remedy, echoing the outcome of the Microsoft case. Read the full article here.
“Basically, if you’re going to have a really strong remedy, you need really strong evidence that this is the cause of the problem,” said Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics. “Grounding all this in Microsoft as the reason, [Mehta] found that there wasn’t enough evidence for a strong structural remedy—splitting off Chrome or something like that—but there was enough causal information to connect these default agreements to the monopolization of the market that the lighter remedies were justified.”
The question the court tried to answer, according to Albrecht, was how to open up the market to competitors. “In the Microsoft case, they pushed for big opening up of APIs and protocols and standardizations there for middleware,” Albrecht said. “In this case, they’re going to open it up by forcing the sharing of the index data. And both of those are meant to kickstart this part of the market where competition had been suffering.”