US v. Google: all the news from the search antitrust showdown

The first day of US v. Google has wrapped up (with a blow-by-blow readthrough of an email argument from 2009, which I don’t think Google’s lawyers found as funny as I did), and I’m headed back to New York — I’ll have more details tomorrow.

For now, if you’d like an overview of what this whole case is about, I appeared on Today, Explained to… well, do exactly what the podcast’s name suggests.

I’ve just finished lunch after the Department of Justice, a group of state attorneys general, and Google made their opening arguments in today’s antitrust trial.

The Department of Justice wants Judge Amit Mehta to focus on “what Google did” — which, in its evaluation, is sign a bunch of restrictive Google Search exclusivity agreements with Apple, Mozilla, and Android manufacturers. Google is arguing that the whole trial is a gift to Microsoft, which (again, in its evaluation) has dismally failed to compete with Google on Search.

There’s no public feed after opening statements, but I’ll be back in court soon to watch the Department of Justice question Google’s chief economist Hal Varian about default search settings. Oh, and there’s a guy in a fake mustache and monocle wandering the halls.

Judge Mehta interrupts Google’s opening statements to ask an important question: there’s all this talk about the power of defaults, and about how easy it is or is not to switch search engines, but does anyone actually switch? Google evidently doesn’t have good data on whether people do, so we might not get hard numbers here. But it’s a good question!

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that nobody switches. Mehta says he knows that.

The government’s argument: Nobody uses Bing because Google made it impossible. Google’s argument so far: nobody uses Bing because Bing sucks. Google’s attorneys are making the case that Microsoft is as well-resourced as anyone to compete, and yet even Windows users mostly pick Google because Google is simply better.

No matter who wins this trial, this is going to be a tough 10 weeks of testimony for Bing.

The big-picture “is Google crushing all possible search competitors” question will dominate US v. Google, but there’s another allegation in here as well: whether Google prevented Microsoft from getting access to SA360, Google’s search marketing tool. The state attorneys are deep in that argument now, arguing that it’s yet another way Google manipulates the search market for its own gain.

Google opening up its tools to its competitor? “It’s like waiting for a Yankee fan to invite you to a Met game,” the attorney said. “Not gonna happen.”

One key question of the US v. Google trial — and any antitrust trial, really — is the size of the market. Google will argue that everything from ChatGPT to TikTok is a real threat in the space, and competition is everywhere. The government is going to try and argue, as attorney Kenneth Dintzer already has, that the market is “general search,” and that that’s really only Google and Bing. Which means it’s really only Google.

Judge Mehta is already poking at this argument, though — it sounds like he’s not convinced that “general search” is a wholly unique thing. This is going to be important.

Opening arguments are underway! Some folks are in the courtroom, where there are no electronics allowed, because this is a trial about the internet and technology, so, sure. The rest of us are listening through an AT&T conferencing line, which feels very fitting for a modern antitrust trial.

Two interesting things already: Judge Amit Mehta asked when Google became a monopoly, and government attorney Kenneth Dintzer said that Google has been illegally maintaining its monopoly since 2010. (Meaning it has been a monopoly even longer.) And Dintzer said in response to another question that he believes fully half of Google searches come through a paid-for spot in a search bar.

If you want a one-sentence summary of Google’s arguments ahead of the start of US v. Google today, that one — from Kent Walker, the company’s president of global affairs — does the job pretty well. This issue of Platformer from a few days ago does a good job of running down both sides of the story we’re going to hear over the next 10 weeks. Is Google great, or is it just unavoidable? We’ll find out.