After EU, Google faces painful reckoning in US as antitrust cases resume world news

While a split may be a tough sell for a Washington judge overseeing the Justice Department's search case, Google has undoubtedly been considering changes to the way it operates for a long time, antitrust experts said.

“The Department of Justice is trying to find solutions that will not only reintroduce competition into search, but also ensure that Google does not re-enter as the market changes,” said Abiel Garcia, an antitrust attorney and partner at Kesselman Brantley Stockinger. LLP. . The solutions may cause Google to “reconsider and reevaluate the business strategy to some extent, but it’s not like we don’t have Google anymore.”

Google criticized the Justice Department's initial proposal as “radical,” saying it had “significant unintended consequences for American consumers, businesses, and competition.”

The company's shares have fallen more than 15% since hitting an all-time high of $191.18 on July 10.

Sharing search information “definitely kicks off competition, which is the goal here,” he said. “It’s the secret sauce from Google’s perspective.”

Daniel Morgan, a fund manager at Synovus Trust Co., said Coca-Cola was asked to provide its recipes to other soft drink makers rather than being required to share its data with Google.

“DOJ is looking to lower the barrier to entry for other search competitors,” Morgan said. Google’s “proprietary algorithms, which have served as its competitive advantage as the world’s dominant search company, will be available as an open source model to its competitors.”

Vanderbilt Law School professor Rebecca Allensworth, who has followed the case closely, said she thinks it is “highly unlikely” that U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta will revisit the separation. Most of the Justice Department's lawsuits against Apple Inc. have made search the default on the iPhone. Focusing on Google's $20 billion deal with him, he said, not Chrome or Android — which are Google products that the DOJ identified as potentially terminated.

Mehta closely followed the Microsoft Corp. case, he said, in which the Justice Department successfully prosecuted the Windows maker in 1998 for monopolizing its computer operating system. The judge in that case initially ruled that Microsoft should be dissolved before dismissing the appeal.

Allensworth said of Mehta: “There is no way the judge could strike down Google in this case.

John Quoca, an economist at Northeastern University who has extensively researched antitrust solutions, said the separation “should be on the table,” at least as a “signal” to Google and other companies pending antitrust cases that antitrust authorities will not accept a weak resolution. .

With a conduct solution, companies have incentives to avoid and even require data access that can be complicated by questions about who gets the data and how much, he said.

“The track record for structural remediation is very good,” Kwoka said, noting that the AT&T split came after years of unsuccessful attempts to resolve behavioral remediation issues. “There could be a lot of collateral damage if those in need wait to face the situation.”

Bill Kovacik, an antitrust professor at George Washington University Law School, said the Justice Department's request was a “conscious attempt to frame” the issue for the judge, “giving him a hot menu, from mild to spicy.”

Despite labeling the separation as a “radical” solution for Google, Kovacic noted that companies today “have a lot of experience merging companies and separating them.” And some of the Justice Department's proposals — such as requiring companies to share some research data — are already in place in Europe as part of the implementation of new digital protection rules, he said.

Quoca and Allensworth also agree that the judiciary could try to use the separation option as an opening strategy, so that Mehta would be more inclined to choose another remedy of his choice, such as data sharing.

“It would be a really progressive solution,” Allensworth said. “Splitting indexes would be an obvious and nice way” to solve problems.