Nearly a year ago, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on the search engine market.
It was a decision that sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and Washington.
Now, lawyers for Google and the Justice Department are facing off again at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C. This time it's to determine what penalties Mehta will levy against the roughly $2 trillion company.
Over the next several weeks, both sides will present evidence and are expected to call a host of witnesses, including major tech industry players. That includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of search engine competitor DuckDuckGo, as well as senior VP's of Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, ChatGPT and Google, according to court documents — though that lineup could change.
Google maintains that it will appeal Mehta's decision once the remedies phase of the trial is complete. The tech giant argues that the DOJ's proposed remedies are both dangerous and "unprecedented" and would hurt American consumers, the economy and tech leadership and innovation. On Sunday, the night, before the hearing was to begin, Google issued a lengthy public blog post saying the DOJ's "sweeping remedy proposals are both unnecessary and harmful."
In response, on Monday morning as she stood outside the courthouse, Gail Slater, the DOJ's Assistant Attorney for the Antitrust Decision, replied, "You know what is dangerous? The threat Google presents to our freedom of speech" and the freedom of digital market innovation.
Slater was joined by other attorneys for the government who read from statements about an hour before proceedings began. They did not take questions from the gathered media.
Inside the courtroom, two tables full of lawyers from the DOJ and Google sat elbow to elbow as proceedings began.
David Dahlquist, the acting deputy director of the DOJ's antitrust civil litigation division, spoke for the government in opening statements. In a roughly 45-minute presentation, he laid out a list of aggressive demands that the government wants to see Google implement.
The DOJ is calling on the company to divest from Chrome, its web browser, and to end exclusive distribution agreements with phone makers like Apple and Samsung, through which Google paid them to establish its search engine as the default browser on their phones. The DOJ is also calling on Judge Mehta to prevent Google from establishing similar exclusive distribution agreements for its AI programs and apps, like its Gemini chatbot, Dahlquist said Monday.
"We are not here for a Pyrrhic victory. We are here to restore competition," Dahlquist said.
This is an inflection point, he said. He asked the court: Will the U.S. allow Google, a monopolist, control the search market, or allow competition to prevail?
The beginning of the end of a tech love affair
The legal battle began in 2020, when the Justice Department filed its antitrust lawsuit against Google.
The crux of the government's argument is that Google has unfair control of a huge market share in U.S. search, a valuation eclipsing $1 trillion. The DOJ's original lawsuit, filed alongside 11 state attorneys general, said the company struck multibillion-dollar deals with Apple and Samsung to make sure its search engine was the default on their phones' web browsers. Those agreements effectively boxed out Google's rivals, the DOJ said. Google has denied this.
This case marked the beginning of the end of the long love affair between the tech world and Washington, D.C. For many years, the tech industry expanded with little regulatory control. But major tech players Meta, Amazon and Apple are now also facing federal lawsuits.
In the very same courthouse where the Google remedy trial is playing out, Meta is currently facing its own antitrust case filed by the Federal Trade Commision. The agency argues Meta has abused its power and acted as a monopoly by acquiring rivals in order to vanquish them as competitors.
And this isn't the government's only suit against Google: They filed another in 2023. Last week, a different federal judge ruled that Google's control of the online advertising and ad-tech markets violates U.S. antitrust laws.
What were the DOJ's arguments?
The government's most forceful request is for Judge Mehta to order the tech company to sell off its popular Chrome browser.
Chrome is a significant gateway to user searches and drives billions in search revenue for Google, Dahlquist said. It's the world's most popular search engine. Forcing Google to sell off this piece of the company would "allow rivals to compete," he said. He called it "a market reality" that Google's ownership of Chrome disincentivizes the emergence of new, competitive alternatives, and that this is a violation of federal antitrust laws.
Google, for its part, has roundly rejected this proposal.
The DOJ is also asking that Google stop making monthly third-party payments to phone makers to ensure its browser is the default option on those phones.
Dahlquist said Google has proposed deleting the word "exclusive" in their agreements with Apple and other companies with any other browser distribution agreements. "That is not enough," he said, arguing that Google can still wedge out other companies by using their existing base agreements and their ability to offer phone makers large sums of money.
The government wants to go a step further to ensure any remedy prevents Google from establishing similar exclusive agreements for its generative AI products, like Gemini. Dahlquist said the rise of Google's AI products could open up another field the company could dominate if it's allowed to keep using exclusive contracts — and they want to prevent that from happening.
How did Google respond?
Google has long vowed to appeal, but first must make it through this remedy trial process.
The company has contended for the past four years that it has never acted as a monopoly and that changes, even small ones, are unnecessary. The company's leaders have said its search product is superior to competitors' — and that's why it dominates the industry.
John E. Schmidtlein, a lawyer for Google, argued in opening statements that the DOJ's list of remedies in this case is just a "wishlist for competitors," and that it will enable them to get resources that took Google decades to develop.
The DOJ's proposals aim "to prop up individual competitors," he said.
Google views the government's demands to divest from Chrome as its most prohibitive and "most extreme" request. The company's leaders have said splitting off Chrome would break the hugely popular feature — a statement Schmidtlein repeated in court. Google can't divest from the Chrome browser without harming other Google products, like the Chrome operating system and Chromebook laptops, he said.
Addressing the DOJ's effort to prevent Google from including Gemini in future exclusive distribution agreements, Schmidtlein said that Gemini was not the subject of the antitrust case and the company does not hold a monopoly on AI products.
Schmidtlein pointed to the success of competitors' AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, MetaAI, and Grok, as evidence that competition within this space is healthy and varied. "The notion that ChatGPT can't get distribution is absurd. They have more distribution than anyone," he said.
Why is this case a big deal?
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor of antitrust law at Vanderbilt Law School, points out that this is the government's biggest antitrust case in decades.
"This case is an extremely big deal. It's hard to overstate it," she said. "It is at least as big a deal as the Microsoft case, which is the last big antitrust case that we had. And that was 25 years ago."
That Microsoft case, which was filed in 1998, was about the company bundling its browser, Internet Explorer, with its Windows operating system. It nearly led to the company being split in two — but Microsoft and the DOJ settled.
Allensworth added that it's also comparable to cases like the Justice Department's 1906 Standard Oil case, which is widely considered the first major monopoly case. A federal court eventually found that the oil conglomerate owned by John D. Rockefeller had illegally monopolized the American refining industry. Standard Oil was ordered to break up into around 40 different companies as a result.
Allensworth said the outcome of this part of Google's trial is hard to predict. But that demanding Google divest from Chrome is not out of the question.
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