The Paradox of Google Search Remedies
The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) won its antitrust case against Google last year, establishing that the company illegally maintained its monopoly in “general search” and “general search text advertising” markets through exclusive default contracts. Now comes the hard part: crafting effective remedies.
I’m on record as saying the question of remedies would be difficult in this case, but new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) suggests it may be even harder than I originally thought. In fact, the findings from researchers Hunt Allcott, Juan Camilo Castillo, Matthew Gentzkow, Leon Musolff, and Tobias Salze challenge many of our assumptions about competition in search markets and raise serious questions about whether any of the proposed antitrust remedies would actually help consumers.