Opinion

Creating more competition could be good for everyone, including Google.

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If that dominance were stripped away, the hope is that Bing — or DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or other search engines — would use the boon of seeing more of our search queries to build better, more competitive search results. Of course, directing more traffic to Bing would also be quite good for the profitability of Bing, which is owned by Microsoft.

So one possible remedy is that Google just pays a fine, and maybe even maintains its default position, but is forced to share all its search query data with its rivals — though privacy advocates might have something to say about even more widespread sharing of consumer data.

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A more likely option is that Google is no longer allowed to pay Apple $20 billion per year to be Safari’s default search engine. This could have some unintended consequences, hurting not just Apple’s bottom line but also Mozilla’s; more than 80 percent of that company’s revenue comes from Google’s payments to be the default search on Firefox).

And, ironically, this outcome might actually help Google. One detail that came out in the trial, cited by the judge in his decision: Even though Windows users were defaulted to Microsoft’s Edge browser and Bing search, 80 percent of them chose to switch to Google search anyway (either directly or by installing Google’s Chrome browser). So even if Google’s default setting on Apple devices soon goes away, most users still might manually switch to Google, meaning Google retains most of the valuable traffic without having to pay.

A final possibility: The next time we buy a phone, we’ll get the full European experience of being asked to select a browser and a search engine. And we’ll all still select Google.

Megan McArdle: Don’t overlook the innovations of monopolists

If you are reading this on a device other than pulped-up dead trees, you can thank Bell Labs. During the golden age of landline telephony, Bell’s in-house skunk works was a fountain of useful inventions, from the laser to the photovoltaic cell to the transistor upon which modern microchips are based. This largesse was, of course, subsidized by Bell’s monopoly over a singularly useful technology.

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Monopolists have a bad name, deservedly, as they often use their market power to deliver worse goods and services at a premium price. But monopoly profits aren’t always siphoned off into monopolist pockets; sometimes, they subsidize socially useful goods.

That’s worth thinking about now that Judge Amit P. Mehta has ruled that Google has a monopoly over search.

It’s not yet clear what sorts of remedies Mehta might impose. The possibilities range from the relatively minor — restricting Google’s ability to pay for positioning as the default search engine on browsers and devices — to carving the company apart. But the more drastic the surgery, the more it will cut into the revenue that is currently subsidizing pie-in-the-sky long-term technology bets, such as self-driving-taxi service Waymo, along with various services that are unlikely to ever become major revenue sources, such as Google Scholar and Google Books.

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Of course, that doesn’t mean the antitrust ruling is necessarily wrong. It’s nice to get free research and development from monopolists, but it doesn’t necessarily offset the large social costs — as well as the potential costs of monopolists using their power to squash innovative upstart competition. Personally, having tried most of the other available browsers and found them wanting, I’m skeptical that consumers would benefit by being pushed toward those instead, but there’s no way to be sure until we experience the aftermath of whatever remedies await.

Bina Venkataraman: This ruling is a cautionary tale for AI

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