Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win For Big Tech? (Episode 468) Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce And Digital Strategy podcast

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Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win for Big Tech? (Episode 468)

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Screenshot of Google search results for the query "Is Google a monopoly?" Google's AI Overview says "Yes, a federal judge ruled in late 2024 that Google illegally maintains a monopoly in the internet search market."

While Judge Amit Mehta has imposed penalties on Google for its anticompetitive behavior, I’m convinced that the big winner in the antitrust trial is… Google. And, to a lesser extent, the rest of Big Tech wins, too.

Confused? Don’t be.

What did Judge Mehta’s ruling say? Why do I think Google won more than they lost? And, more importantly, what does all of this mean for your business?

That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

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Transcript: Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win for Big Tech? (Thinks Out Loud 468)

Welcome to the show. I’m Tim Peter.

A few weeks ago, I talked about which of the Big Tech companies are most likely to win in the AI space. My leading candidates in order were:

Google
Amazon
OpenAI/ChatGPT
Microsoft
Meta
Apple

As I said at the time, “Google has an added challenge in terms of its anti-trust situation, which is a big deal and could trip them up massively. They might be able to buy their way out of this, you know, with major fines or, I don’t know, contributions to presidential libraries or some nonsense like that, but we don’t know.”

Well, we’ve just learned the first set of penalties Google will face for its anti-competitive behavior. And I don’t care what anyone else says. Google won. Yes, they still face another antitrust ruling and the adtech case later this month, but at least in this first one they got off super easy. Most importantly, the judge’s ruling ensures that Google stays a prominent and probably dominant player in search and artificial intelligence. I’m going to get into why in just a moment.

But the real question is what this means to you, and what do you do about this reality? In other words, how do you make sure you don’t lose when Google wins?

This is episode 468 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

So first, what happened in the trial? There is lots to unpack. Judge Amit Mehta mostly went with the lightest penalties he could have. Google really got off super easy.

And if you think it’s just me saying that, The Verge reported on the large number of Google’s critics who were not happy with the ruling. Similarly, Google’s stock price shot up between 8-9% after the ruling came out. So Wall Street certainly thinks they won. Wall Street certainly wasn’t going to push up the stock price if Judge Mata had wanted Google to sell off, you know, Chrome or Android, for instance.

You should read through the ruling if you get the chance. Certainly parts of it. It’s super clear. And it gives great insight into how Google’s business works, both today and going forward. I’d debate a few minor points about the overall marketplace and how Google responds to it and who’s likely to win and why, but generally it’s as good a primer as you’re going to see.

Essentially, the judge ruled that Google has a monopoly in the market for general search engines — what they call GSEs all throughout the ruling — and that Google illegally leveraged that monopoly to hurt competition.

To remedy the situation, the judge ruled that Google needs to face several penalties. There are several penalties, several remedies that they have to deal with.

The judge ruled that several of the recommended penalties from the plaintiffs from the Department of Justice and some of the other folks involved went too far and didn’t address the core problems of Google’s anti-competitive behavior. The two major ones that the judge ruled are that Google doesn’t have to sell off the Chrome browser and that it doesn’t have to sell off Android. Those are enormous sources of data for Google.

They’re hugely important in terms of it learning how customers behave. But the judge ruled that those were well outside the scope of the general search engine market. So Google gets to keep them and keep using them as they always have. That’s huge. The penalties the judge did impose are as follows. First, Google has to give what are called qualified competitors access to some of its data.

I’m gonna get into this a lot in a moment. As the ruling states, this is a quote, “the size of Google’s index gives it a key competitive advantage over existing small GSEs like DuckDuckGo and emerging companies in the GenAI space like ChatGPT.” Witnesses testified to what is known in the industry as the 80-20 problem. “Building a search index that can answer 80% of queries is capital intensive, but attainable in the short to medium term.” This is a sub-quote within this. They said “you can get to 80-20 pretty quickly.” And they described ChatGPT’s goal, “…to answer 80% of queries with its own search index and the difficulties associated with answering the remaining 20%.”

Now back to the main part of the ruling, “…it says answering the remaining 20%, which comprises long tail queries is particularly challenging because it requires the index to contain very specific and often obscure sources.” Here’s another sub quote, “When sources are less common, we may not even know that they even exist and we may thus not discover what makes the best source.” Apple’s Eddie Cue during the trial noted, “to me the only thing that’s keeping them [and he’s talking about ChatGPT here]… the only thing that’s keeping them from potentially doing that again is growing their search index. They have to get better at the search index part. They’re very good at their LLMs. You know, they’ve already built large language models that are as good or better than most. What that will do is give a product is create a product that gives better results, new capabilities. You know, those are things that people are interested in today.”

That’s a big deal. So we’re going to get into this in some detail in a little bit.

Another ruling that the judge made was that Google still gets to pay companies like Apple, Samsung, Mozilla/Firefox, and Opera for making Google the default search engine in their mobile phones and browsers. While it might seem like a good idea to stop these revenue sharing payments, the biggest losers, if they were to do that, would be… Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, and Opera, and almost certainly consumers of their products.

And it wouldn’t hurt Google at all. Quite the contrary. They’d get to keep billions — tens of billions! — of dollars every year. As the court rightly points out, Google’s facing greater competition in the form of AI products from folks like ChatGBT or Perplexity or Microsoft’s Copilot or Claude than it’s faced in years.

What he did require was a bunch of data sharing. The court wrote that,“Google sees long-tail queries in orders of magnitude greater than its next closest rival, Bing. Because it sees such queries far more often, Google is more adept at answering them. Data sharing remedies thus can help to close the sizable advantage Google has in answering long-tail queries, thereby improving product quality and attractiveness to new users.”
There’s a sub-quote in this that says, “unless you’re sharing tail queries, the information is not terribly useful for a search engine to improve its own product and bridge the scale gap.”

So what the judge is saying here is by giving access to long tail queries, they’re going to help Google’s potential competitors, “qualified competitors,” create better products.

But there’s a caveat here, and it’s an OK caveat. The judge wants to make sure that these qualified competitors are in fact competing and not just what’s called “free riding,” know, leveraging Google’s success for their own benefit.

As he wrote in the ruling, “qualified competitors’ competitive advantage will have to come from innovation and differentiating their search services from Google.” So Google must share data from its index, but not the whole index. It only has to share :

The unique DocID for each document, including notating whether or not they’re duplicates
A DocID to URL map, basically the URL itself
The first time that URL was seen
When the URL was last crawled
Google’s spam score, which is a big deal,
A device type flag. Did they get this from mobile or did they get this from desktop internet?

And Google only has to do this for web URLs it has crawled. Not for images, not for videos, not for any structured data that they get from commercial partnerships.

As the judgment states, “qualified competitors will receive a one-time only snapshot of the relevant data contained in Google search index or at or around the time they’re so certified.”

Now the reason that they did this was, “it enables qualified competitors to build their own search indexes to answer long tail queries, thereby giving them the kickstart they need to compete. Further, a one-time disclosure minimizes the risk of free riding identified by Google’s expert economist and acknowledged by the plaintiffs.”

So whatever companies get this data can use it to build their own indexes and they can use it to build their own general search engines to start competing with Google more effectively.

It’s on them, though, to execute and to gain customer attention for their product. It’s not Google’s job to drive their success, according to the judge, only to eliminate the big existing barrier to that success, the lack of a proper index.

Google also has to share what’s called its “Glue” and “RankEmbed” data with qualified competitors. This is again from the ruling. “The data underlying Glue consists of information relating to (1) the query, such as its text, language, user location, and user device type, (2) ranking information, including the 10 blue links and any other triggered search features that appear on the search engine results page, such as images, maps, knowledge panel, et cetera. (3) search interaction information, such as clicks, hovers, and duration of the search engine results page. And (4), query interpretation and suggestions, including spelling correction and salient query terms.”

They also have to share their Navboost memorization system that, as the ruling says, “aggregates click and query data about the web results delivered to the SERP” and its RankEmbed data that are ranking models. “[Some percentage] of 70 days of the search logs plus scores generated by human raters and used by Google to measure the quality of the organic search results.”

These are all things that help Google’s AI learn better what quality pages are. It helps them, this is from the ruling, “more efficiently identify the best documents to retrieve, even if a query lacks certain terms. RankEmbed particularly helped Google improve its answers to long tail queries.”

Now that’s all fantastic. This will help potential competitors build more effective indexes and have a better sense of (A) the pages they should pay attention to, and (B) the things that aren’t worth worrying about because the customer interaction data says it’s not that important.

The court imposed limits here too, though. The data will be shared, “at least twice… [noting that] a more than one-time disclosure is reasonable given the importance of updating training data with fresh information.”

Reading from the ruling though, the court, however, “intends to set a cap on the number of such disclosures that can occur during the term of the judgment.” And like the earlier data disclosure notes, a cap protects against “…qualified competitors free riding on Google’s data, and it will lessen the burdens associated with implementing privacy measures that will have to be applied before disclosure occurs.”

Google also has to supply data around what are called “certain auction changes” in its ad platform. This one is actually super interesting and may prove hugely valuable to advertisers. But the court left it to a “technical committee” — consisting of folks with “expertise in software engineering, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, economics, behavioral science, [and] data privacy and data security” — to work out the details of exactly what data Google has to provide, how frequently they have to provide it, and for how long they have to provide it. Actual members of that committee are still to be determined too.

Now, I’m going to watch that one closely, but at the moment, I really can’t judge what impact that’s going to have on Google, and more importantly, what impact it’s going to have on you.

There are also a series of smaller remedies around search syndication and such, but most of those aren’t material to this discussion, so I’m going to skip them.

While these data sharing remedies aren’t nothing, Google also gets to keep private all kinds of data that the plaintiffs in the case sought:

Google doesn’t have to share their Gemini training data.
They don’t have to share their ad data.
They still get to self-preference many of their features and services like AI Overviews, AI Mode, Circle to Search, and others.

In short, they basically get to continue doing what they’ve always done. Yes, they have to provide qualified competitors with data, but, and this is key to the whole thing to me, the competitors have to be able to put that data to work. It’s on them to make the data work.

Those competitors still need to develop capabilities and utility that customers want if customers are going to switch from using Google. Their competitors still need to gain distribution. That means they need to find a way to put those capabilities in front of customers and attract them to use it. And then they still need to monetize whatever they offer. They have to find a business model that works. They need to find a way to pay for it.

And that last one is a huge deal. Journalist Ed Zitron, I would say he’s an AI pessimist. I would say he’s as bearish on AI as a real thing as you can get. And he had a thing on BlueSky recently where he said,

every model provider is selling monthly software subscriptions and token-based API calls at a discounted rate, because if they had to charge their real costs, they’d immediately make their already unprofitable customers’ businesses even less economically viable. As a result, we are in a deadly situation where every company building software on top of AI models is already unprofitable, and that’s before model companies are forced to start charging their actual costs.

He concludes by saying “these costs that are so severe that they’re causing the most successful companies in the industry, who do not even have to pay for their own infrastructure build out, to lose billions of dollars.”

In other words, only companies with very deep pockets have the best odds of weathering wherever we end up. They have to find a way to pay for this. Which, as much as I hate to say it, leads us back to Big Tech.

Now note that I am including OpenAI/ChatGPT in the Big Tech bucket at the moment. They are as well positioned as anyone. VCs are pouring a metric crap ton of money into the company to help it become Big Tech’s newest members. They could win. Time’s gonna tell though.

But for now, Google remains the 800 pound gorilla that scares the hell out of every other 800 pound gorilla. They’ve won their first antitrust battle pretty handily, pretty significantly.

The second one later this month could be huge because it gets to the heart of how Google pays for all its success. A negative ruling there could be fatal. They’ll also appeal that one all the way to the Supreme Court or, again, you know, make a donation to a presidential library if needed. Their ad solutions are existential. They win that one or they die.

For now, though, Google wins. So if that’s the case, what do you do about it? Well, I go back to things we’ve talked about before.

First, you must understand your customers. What do your customers need? How are they asking these questions? Where are they asking these questions? You can use tools like Heatseeker.ai or SparkToro or SEMrush or lots of other ones to better understand those questions.

Then you want to develop content that answers those questions well. In particular, though, focus on content that answers customers’ questions clearly and concisely. You’re writing for AI agents and bots as well as people, and those agents and bots need simple, clear answers to their questions.

You need to distribute that content broadly. Obviously, I remain convinced of the need for a hub-and-spoke approach to your content — where the hub is your own web presence, like your website and your email list and the spokes consist of social and syndicated content platforms.

You do want to make sure though that you’re giving as much attention to the spokes as you are the hubs so that your customers and AI tools find you everywhere. These days it’s not just about being in one place, you’ve got to be everywhere.

The next thing you want to do is learn more about structured data and apply it to your site. Structured data matters a ton to AI tools. This part of the world is continuing to evolve, but start with schema.org, then look to expand into other structured data types to better help AI bots understand your content.

And of course, you need to keep learning. Google may have won for now. We’ll see where we are in about a month. And things are changing fast. What I have to say today is certainly no way, in no way the last word on this topic. I’d suggest you take a look at our past episodes, including

Google closes the gate
AI in zero-click search: the real story
The rise of agentic AI among your customers

I’ll link to all of those in the show notes, as well as many of the episodes that those themselves link to and the links embedded in those.

In any case, I’m confident that if you focus on your customers, if you focus on their needs, if you create content that is easily read by both people and machines, if you get that content in front of your customers, both on your website and on various spokes of the hub and spoke, and if you keep learning, it really doesn’t matter whether or not Google wins, because you’ll win too.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about here today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too? Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 468, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

And if you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest my book called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. You can pick up a copy on Amazon.com Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech or bookshop.org. And let me know what you think. I’d really love to hear from you. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, let me know what you think. Drop me a note. Put a comment on LinkedIn or YouTube. I’d really love to hear from you. I would so much appreciate learning from you as much as anything.

With all that said, I want to thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I will be back next week with a new episode. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

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