Breaking Up Google Isn’t Nearly Enough

Have you looked for a recipe online? If so, you probably found yourself on a blinking hellscape of a web page that was as long as an epic poem, but without any of the insight. First, you get the hokey story about the recipe’s origin. Then there are the videos. The irrelevant ads. The photos of each ingredient. The thousands of words are divided up into sections with headlines like, “Chia Seed Pudding Troubleshooting.”

If you graduated from college anytime before 2010, you may remember a time when websites provided relevant information, and did so swiftly. The reason so many businesses have tortured their web pages into a pulsing, ad-cluttered, endless scroll is because that is what it takes to check all the boxes needed to rank highly in Google search results. The result succeeds in its goal — getting the website to land at the top of Google results — but does little to get you to your goal. And you have little alternative but wade through the morass.

A federal judge recently told us what we already knew: that Google is a monopolist in the Web search market. In his scathing 277-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta noted that Google has an 89.2 percent share of the overall search market and a 94.9 percent share of searches conducted on mobile devices.

Fixing the problem is trickier. Next month, the judge will start deliberations on how to fix an industry that is so thoroughly dominated by one player. It is not going to be easy to jump-start competition in a market where Google has spent decades and billions of dollars quashing rivals.

The judge seems likely to ban the kind of exclusive distribution deals Google long used to make its product the default search engine on Apple phones and in Web browsers such as Firefox. In 2021, Google spent more than $26 billion on these deals. And the Department of Justice is reportedly considering pushing for a breakup of Google — which would stop the company from installing Google search as the default option on its popular Chrome Web browser and Android phones.

Both of those remedies are a good first step, but they aren’t enough. They only address the barriers that competitors would face in marketing a rival search engine. But there are also huge obstacles to anyone who just wants to build one.