Google’s Antitrust Case: A Detailed Breakdown of the Consequences
A U.S. judge has finalized the consequences for Google LLC after the company was found to hold an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search. In mid-2024, Google was ruled to have violated antitrust laws, and in September of this year, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta issued a ruling against the most severe consequences proposed by the Department of Justice. However, Google was ordered to loosen its hold on search data.
New Details Emerge
On Friday, Judge Mehta issued additional details for his ruling, stating that “the age-old saying ‘the devil is in the details’ may not have been devised with the drafting of an antitrust remedies judgment in mind, but it sure does fit.” The new details include:
* Google cannot enter into any deal like the one it has with Apple, where Google pays billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on Safari browsers, unless the agreement terminates no more than one year after the date it is entered.
* The ruling includes deals involving generative artificial intelligence products, and any “application, software, service, feature, tool, functionality, or product” that involve or use genAI or large language models.
* GenAI “plays a significant role in these remedies,” Mehta wrote.
Technical Committee Requirements
The judge also included requirements on the makeup of a technical committee that will determine with whom Google must share its data. The committee members must be experts in some combination of:
* Software engineering
* Information retrieval
* Artificial intelligence
* Economics
* Behavioral science
* Data privacy and data security
No committee member can have a conflict of interest, such as having worked for Google or any of its competitors in the six months prior to or one year after serving in the role.
Data Sharing Requirements
The committee must have access to Google’s source code and algorithms, subject to a confidentiality agreement. Google must share some of the raw search interaction data it uses to train its ranking and AI systems, but not the actual algorithms. In September, Mehta said those data sets represent a “small fraction” of Google’s overall traffic, but argued the company’s models are trained on data that contributed to Google’s edge over competitors.
Background
In August 2024, Mehta ruled that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act and held a monopoly in search and related advertising. The antitrust trial started in September 2023. Google has previously said it will appeal the judge’s monopoly ruling.
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