In a decision by the District Court of the U.S. District of Columbia, Google has been found guilty of monopolizing its leadership in online search by its exclusive deals with browser providers. These deals, the court says, entrenched a position it had won by being the best search engine, keeping competitors from being able to challenge its position. The decision relies on the fact that very few people take advantage of the ability to change their default browser search engines.
The court has not yet announced any remedies and is unlikely to until Google has exhausted its appeals. The court will be unable to take the EU remedy of requiring a “choice screen” on devices, as the makers of the devices are not a party to the lawsuit in question. It may be that the court bans Google from bidding for the position of default search engine, which would surely benefit Microsoft the most while hurting the device manufacturers, which would receive less revenue from the process and might therefore have to increase prices. It is hard to see consumer welfare benefiting.
However, the whole question could be moot. Early adopters already are moving away from Google as their default search engine; Julian Simon Award–winner Balaji Srinivasan recently showed his 1 million followers on X how to change their search engines to Perplexity AI on Google’s own browser, Chrome, in about 30 seconds. AI-based search engines are almost certainly the future, and Google is famous for having botched its AI rollout.
Moreover, on the most popular current computing devices, smartphones, users no longer are tied to the Web browser and its defaults. Apps are increasingly the way in which people interact with the internet on their phones and tablets. People might well choose to use the Perplexity or Chat-GPT apps as their primary search engines rather than their devices’ web browsers, especially if the large-language models can shake off their frustrating habit of making stuff up.
What this means is a tale as old as the U.S. antitrust system — that by the time the court gets around to providing its solution, the market has already solved it itself. This is one of the central problems of relying on antitrust to solve problems, as Bob Crandall of the Brookings Institution wrote back in 2000, when Microsoft, the likely winner in today’s case, was the target. As Crandall notes,
In 1969 International Business Machines was charged with monopolizing the computer industry. But whatever IBM had done to incur the Justice Department’s wrath became irrelevant in a world in which personal computers and minicomputers were making deep inroads into the “mainframe” computer business. Thirteen years later, the government simply dropped the case.
It may well be that AI does the government’s job for it, not just making the default search engine in a Web browser irrelevant but making search engines as we know them today themselves irrelevant. And we’ll likely all be better off for it.