What the Google antitrust trial means for internet search habits

If government regulators prevail against Google in the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century, are likely to unleash sweeping changes that will undermine the dominance of a search engine that defines the Internet for billions of people.

As the 10-week trial investigating Google’s business practices nears the halfway point, it’s still too early to say whether U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta will side with the Justice Department and try to handcuff a of the most predominant technology companies in the world.

If Mehta rules that Google has maintained an illegal monopoly on search, the punishment could open new online avenues for consumers and businesses to explore the internet for information, entertainment and commerce.

“The judge can force Google to open the floodgates so that more startups and other competitors can put greater competitive pressure on Google, which will create higher quality online services,” said Luther Lowe, senior vice president of public policy at Yelp. The online business review site has been one of Google’s harshest critics, spending more than a decade fighting a strategy that favors its own services in search results.

Google’s search engine gained its enormous market share by almost instantly presenting people with a useful selection of the billions of websites that have been indexed since Larry Page and Sergey Brin, former Stanford University graduate students , developed the technology in the late 1990s.

In addition to its technological wizardry, Google also pays billions of dollars each year to ensure that its search engine is the default setting for answering queries entered on the world’s most popular smartphones and web browsers.

These agreements don’t prevent users from switching to a different search engine in their settings, but it’s a tedious process that few people bother to do. This reality is why Google is willing to pay so much for a privileged position, according to the Department of Justice.

Google’s payments for search preeminence — including an estimated $15 billion to $20 billion a year to Apple alone — are at the forefront of the Justice Department’s case, so the judge is likely to ban them if it rules against Google.

If that were to happen, experts believe the most likely solution in the United States would be to require smartphones and web browsers to display a range of different search engines during the setup process. That is something that is already done in Europe, where everything indicates, so far, that the majority of people still opt for Google.

That could be because they believe Google is actually the best search engine — as Google argues in its defense — or because they simply trust the brand more than rival options like Bing, from Microsoftor DuckDuckGo, which focuses on privacy.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that Google has almost hypnotic control over users when he testified this month during the trial.

“You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth and you search on Google,” Nadella said. She then added that the only way to break that habit is to modify the default settings.

If the ruling does not preclude Google’s rivals from paying to be the automatic search engine on smartphones and web browsers, Microsoft could buy the default position for Bing, an opportunity that Nadella indicated he would take advantage of.

“There are default settings; is the only thing that matters in terms of changing search behavior,” Nadella testified.

Florian Schaub, an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan, believes the fairest outcome of the trial would be a blanket ban on all predetermined agreements between two companies.

“The current environment is being shaped by architecture designed by the large companies that control the space,” Schaub explained. “What the government can do is inject some neutrality into this and give consumers some real options. “If even then people choose to use Google, that is at least a consumer choice, which would be better than letting people stick to a default because they are conditioned to that default.”

Google the favorite on the iPhone

In testimony during the trial, Apple executive Eddy Cue said the company has adopted Google as the preferred search engine on the iPhone and other products because it provides the best experience for its customers. That stance has sparked speculation that if Apple is prevented from using Google as the iPhone’s default search engine, it could flex its muscle as the world’s richest company and develop its own search technology.

However, a widespread ban on default search agreements — which have been highly profitable for Apple and other companies, such as wireless carrier Verizon — could trigger unintended consequences, such as an increase in the prices of other popular products.

“If Google no longer pays a lot of money to Apple and other companies, they could raise the prices of their devices,” said David Olson, an associate professor at Boston University School of Law who is following the antitrust trial. “I don’t think they will be large (increases), but we could see some price increases because Google has essentially been subsidizing the cost of devices like the iPhone.”

Another consequence of a ban on default search deals is that Google could still have a dominant advantage in search if people continue to proactively choose it, and the company would have billions more dollars to spend on other areas it previously devoted to agreements that I really didn’t need at all.

“Google must think it gets a lot out of those default deals, but maybe they’re not really worth that much,” Olson added. “Maybe their cost/benefit analysis is wrong and they will end up making more money and with the same dominance. “That would be ironic.”

Although the lawsuit focuses on Google’s search engine, a government victory could have broader consequences across the tech industry if Mehta were to decide that all default settings are anticompetitive and ban all default settings.

“If one of the outcomes of the trial is that there needs to be more neutral options, it would not only affect Google on Android phones, but it could also affect Apple and the iPhone,” Schaub said. “Does this mean Google phones might have to offer Siri (Apple’s virtual assistant) as an alternative to Google Assistant? Or would Apple devices have to offer Google Assistant?

Such a decision would open a crack in the digital wall that Apple has built around the iPhone to give its own software and certain products — such as Siri — exclusive access to the device’s more than one billion users, setting the stage for another Possible legal battle.