The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board deconstructed the DOJ’s remedies request in the Google Search lawsuit. Their piece revealed what the DOJ’s case really is: nothing more than an attempt to punish Google at the expense of consumers. 

The judge in the case agrees that Google provides consumers with the “highest quality search engine.”

The Editorial Board quotes Judge Amit Mehta’s opinion: “Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions. The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.”

DOJ’s remedies have no basis in antitrust law and would only benefit Google’s rivals.

“[T]he government now wants to degrade Google’s search-engine quality to help less successful rivals. Start with its proposal to require Google to divest its popular Chrome browser, which by default uses the company’s web search. DOJ says Chrome lets Google collect more data on users to better target ads and refine search results. Yet if advertisers and users benefit from this product integration, what’s the antitrust problem?”

One proposal forces the company to pay people to use rival products.

“The state Attorneys General who have joined the lawsuit also want to make Google fund a ‘nationwide advertising and education program’ to encourage Americans to use other search engines, including with ‘short-term incentive payments.’ Antitrust enforcers have clearly lost the plot when they want to force a company to pay customers to use an inferior competing product.”

DOJ’s proposed remedies would strengthen a bigger company, Microsoft—at the expense of American consumers.

“The main beneficiary would be Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which could bid less for default placement. Note that Microsoft’s market capitalization is 50% larger than Google’s. To hamper one tech giant, DOJ would bolster a competing colossus. Ditto for the government’s plan to block Google from using artificial intelligence to improve its search engine. This would give a leg up to Microsoft’s Bing AI tool, as well as OpenAI, which is developing its own search tool.”

Forced data sharing endangers Americans.

“DOJ even wants Google to socialize its data. The government’s filing proposes to force Google ‘to provide rivals and potential rivals both user-side and ads data for a period of ten years, at no cost, on a non-discriminatory basis.’ Could this include foreign competitors, such as China’s Tencent or ByteDance? Don’t worry, DOJ’s filing suggests ‘proper privacy safeguards.'”

Punishing Google will undermine American competitiveness and help China.

“All of this is taking place as the U.S. is in a high-stakes race with China for the lead in artificial intelligence. Google is an American leader in AI investment. Antitrust policy was designed to police genuine market abuses, not punish companies for success.”

For more on the Google Search remedies, read here, here, and here.