A new white paper by scholars from Indiana University, Harvard, and the University of Southern California, “Ensuring Antitrust Actually Promotes Competition in the Digital Economy,” shows that the Department of Justice’s proposals in its Google Search antitrust case antitrust case would harm consumers, undermine innovation, deter investment, and weaken the companies that have propelled the U.S. to global digital leadership.

Structural Breakups Are Rare and Usually Harmful

Structural breakups are a vanishingly rare antitrust remedy. In more than 130 years, only four single-firm monopolization cases have resulted in divestitures. And none have occurred in the last four decades.

Now, the DOJ is calling for similar action against Google. These proposals would unravel the integration that makes these platforms useful and economically sustainable.

America’s Tech Edge Comes From Innovation At Scale

American technology companies have earned their global leadership through relentless innovation. Companies like Google invest tens of billions annually in research and development, with Google alone spending $45.9 billion in 2024, or 25% of gross profit. For context, $45.9 billion is almost twice the amount of McDonald’s total revenue, invested in innovations. 

Chrome Breakup Harms Consumers

If separated from Google, Chrome would either collapse or require major retooling, likely shifting to licensing or subscription models that increase consumer costs. This could mean having to ask users to pay to use Chrome for the first time. Unlike products with built-in monetization, Chrome generates no direct revenue. Its utility comes from being embedded within a broader ad-supported ecosystem. Furthermore, without Google’s resources and scale, a divested Chrome would risk becoming the next Firefox, which once thrived on innovation but declined rapidly due to underinvestment. It is clear that a divestment would only serve to destroy Chrome. 

Default Settings Reflect Consumer Preferences

The authors demonstrate that self-preferencing, choice defaults, and shared revenue arrangement, are frequently procompetitive, as they can contribute to product quality, and often deliver real economic value to consumers.

— A 2025 field experiment by Allcott et al. found that removing Google as the default only shifted 1.1% of search traffic to Bing, a negligible difference.

Default settings, in other words, reflect consumer preference, not market manipulation. 

Moreover, supplier agreements power the broader ecosystem. Search deals between Google and software or device makers are not just about defaults, they’re often the lifeblood of smaller companies.

— Mozilla, for instance, receives 85% of its funding through its search deal with Google. Eliminating that support would “put Firefox out of business” according to the Mozilla CFO, reducing browser choice and undermining the very competition the DOJ claims to protect.

Forced Disclosure of User Data Will Chill Investment and Harm Consumers

Just as concerning is the proposal to force Google to share its search index, ad data, and AI infrastructure with rivals. According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, this would amount to a “de facto divestiture” of Google Search—a foundational technology built through decades of investment.

Forced disclosure of data creates a “free-rider” problem where competitors benefit from another firm’s investments without bearing the cost. This ultimately creates an incentive to not invest, stifling innovation, degrading product quality, and weakening data security.Hagiu and Wright (2023) show that firms often subsidize consumers to build market share and gather data—but when data sharing is mandated, those incentives disappear, leading to reduced investment and potentially higher prices. 

History Teaches These Types of Proposals Help Foreign Rivals

The U.S. has walked this path before with RCA and with Xerox. In each case, antitrust regulators pursued bold remedies in the name of competition. In turn, foreign rivals gained ground and American innovation faltered

— In 1958, the DOJ settled an antitrust case against RCA by requiring it to license its color television patents royalty-free to domestic and foreign firms, including Japanese manufacturers. What followed was the explosive growth of Japanese electronics companies like Sony and Matsushita (now Panasonic), which used U.S. technology to undercut and ultimately overtake American firms. By the 1970s, the U.S. television industry had collapsed. RCA, once a titan of American innovation, never recovered and was later sold off in pieces.

— In 1975, the FTC forced Xerox to disclose and license its copier patents as part of a settlement over alleged monopolistic conduct. The result? Japanese firms likeCanon, Ricoh, and Minolta rapidly gained access to Xerox’s proprietary technologies. These companies, operating under more favorable industrial policies at home, used that knowledge to flood global markets with cheaper copiers. By the mid-1980s, Xerox had lost nearly half its global market share and the U.S. had effectively ceded another critical industry.

Today’s antitrust campaign risks repeating these same mistakes. Repeating the past’s mistakes today has even more consequences, as the tech industry holds much more natural security importance than televisions or copiers. American tech leadership was built through bold ideas and innovation, not bureaucratic and intrusive micro-management.