The Trump administration is trying to fix a market that isn’t broken—and in doing so, it risks breaking the parts that are working just fine.
That’s the irony at the heart of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) proposed remedies in its antitrust case against Google Search. Following the lead of the Biden DOJ, the Trump DOJ wants to punish Google for being too successful a service whose time has passed: Internet Search. And the new DOJ is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to do so: Force a divestiture of the Chrome browser, prohibit important distribution deals, and require Google to hand to its rivals the critical knowledge it has created—even when those rivals won’t be the search business the DOJ seems to imagine.
The DOJ concedes that search itself is being redefined by generative AI—an AI system using deep learning to create new content: images, text, and the like. The very players supposedly in need of government rescue—Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others—must abandon their old notions of search or be eaten by generative AI. Customers want information, knowledge, and ideas. Not web links. The DOJ will create market failure from a market that is working.
According to news reports, during the closing arguments of the remedies phase, Judge Amit Mehta raised a fundamental contradiction in the government’s case: If Google is a monopoly only within the narrow category of “general search engines,” how can the DOJ justify remedies that only serve to hamstring Google in the fast-evolving AI ecosystem that the DOJ in effect admits will kill search as we know it? If these generative AI tools are already competing for user queries, doesn’t that undermine the claim that Google holds a dominant position?
The government can’t have it both ways. At least not with validity.
Even more troubling is the DOJ’s belief that innovation must be orchestrated by bureaucrats and judges rather than created by businesses and tested through market competition. Google’s agreements with Apple, Mozilla, and others weren’t tools of coercion; they were voluntary business deals that all parties agreed made their products better and more competitive based on customers’ choices. Mozilla itself said that losing Google’s support would put it out of business. Is eliminating a browser engine from the market the DOJ’s idea of protecting competition?
Then there’s the data sharing demand. The DOJ wants Google to give competitors access to its search index, and perhaps more—including information on how search results are ranked and displayed. But what about customers’ privacy concerns? It seems the DOJ wants those to be left to a “technical committee” to sort out later. Translation: This “technical committee” is a placeholder for bureaucratic control over customers. This isn’t innovation—it’s product design by government decree. Does anyone really want to invest their 401(k) in this product?
The tech world moves quickly. Just in the last few months, OpenAI bought Io Products for $6.4 billion, Amazon struck an AI deal with the New York Times, and Apple announced plans to integrate multiple AI tools into Safari. An antitrust remedy designed for 2020—and especially one that assumes that 2020 will last forever—will be obsolete by 2026—if not by next quarter.
That’s why government attempts to engineer market structure almost always backfire. They visualize freezing innovation in place, punishing the firms doing the most to improve consumer experience, and handing control over product design to regulators instead of customers. That’s not antitrust enforcement. It is the government as monopolist.
If the goal is to encourage innovation and competition, the solution isn’t to try to remake markets or firms by forcing the winners to share proprietary tools with rivals: It is to let markets work. Consumers—not courts—should decide who creates the next innovation.
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