Avoiding Misguided Remedies in the Google Search Antitrust Case
In his August 2024 ruling in the Google Search antitrust litigation, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta found that Google’s default-distribution agreements—through which the company paid Apple, Mozilla, and others to make Google the preloaded search engine—were exclusionary under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The court’s rationale focused on “default bias” and scale effects; by securing key default placements, Google purportedly obtained an insurmountable advantage from users’ reluctance to switch away from the default provider, the effect of which was to deny rivals the user data necessary to refine their own search engines, making it significantly harder for them to catch up.
Attention now turns to remedies. Under former President Joe Biden, U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) leadership advocated aggressive measures: banning Google from paying for default status, restricting its forays into artificial intelligence (AI), mandating data sharing with rivals, and even breaking off Google’s Chrome browser.
But the current DOJ leadership under President Donald Trump should not replicate their predecessors’ overreach. Rather, they should adopt more carefully tailored remedies that address any exclusionary effects, without harming broader innovation or saddling the court with the role of market designer.
The Biden DOJ’s proposed remedies fail to meet antitrust’s requirement of a tight causal connection between offense and relief, and risk imposing significant costs. The new DOJ should consider narrower solutions—like limiting exclusive terms—rather than imposing risky structural or behavioral fixes that could jeopardize browser competition, chill AI investment, and create more problems than they solve.