Watch the full speaking program and Q&A here
WASHINGTON, DC – Today, The Tech Oversight Project circulated footage from its fireside chat about the Google search remedy trial. The program included opening remarks from Doha Mekki, former Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, followed by a moderated panel with Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project, Lee Hepner, Senior Legal Counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project, and Kamyl Bazbaz, Vice President of Public Affairs for DuckDuckGo.
Key quotes from the program are below.
Doha Mekki, Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for DOJ Antitrust Division:
“April 2025 might have been the most exciting month in antitrust.”
“There was nothing that we thought about more when we were at DOJ than, not just litigating these cases properly, but … really thinking about how you open up markets to become more vibrant and more conducive to the kind of investment and innovation that Americans expect and that American ingenuity promotes, after they’ve been hobbled by monopoly power for so long.”
“But it’s not just those defaults. It’s that when people use the search engine more, there’s more scale, the product gets better, rivals are deprived of scale, and it also raises something called scale barriers to entry in these vital markets. And so what happens? All of us as consumers suffer. We get less innovation[.]”
“We don’t know what innovation–what interesting products and services–might have come to the market but for this monopoly power. That really gives you a sense of how destructive monopolies can really be, particularly in information markets like the ones we’re talking about today.”
“And I think that the real action here is going to be on the potential for evasion – more than Standard Oil, more than AT&T, more than Microsoft. We are talking about not just one monopoly or two monopolies, but we’re talking about a company that is built on flanking monopolies.”
“Google, like other large tech incumbents, is able to circumvent or achieve the same ends because it has so many products and services that kind of build on its power in internet search.”
“And I think the showstopper is this is a company that three separate times now – and in three separate jurisdictions – has been admonished by courts for document destruction and other habits that really shine a spotlight and raise an important question about how much Google is going to be entrusted to comply by any remedy order that is imposed.”
“The government is asking for some remarkably simple remedies. They’re trying to put an end to the revenue sharing agreements and search default contracts that the court readily found had helped prop up its monopoly power. It’s seeking divestiture. On Google’s telling, this is very extreme, but they’re actually not.”
“I think the biggest question is going to be: How do you stop a monopoly that itself is flanked by many other monopolies? How do you think about the future when we know that Google’s play has been to monopolize all of the questions you pose on the open Internet, and will they transform themselves into a company that monopolizes the answers too? That is what is at stake in terms of the AI products.”
“No monopolist is going to enjoy the intense supervision of a technical committee and courts. But one way to make that a little bit easier is to divest products that really help get markets well down the road to becoming more vibrant and open.”
Sacha Haworth, Executive Director at The Tech Oversight Project:
On search market:
“Comparison shopping is somewhat abstract, but it’s also the most obvious result in the divestiture. I think our hope is we’ll see a lot of other search engines that will prioritize things like privacy, not stalking every move you make around the internet, and people can make choices based on that.”
“Apple was just ruled to have violated their antitrust ruling. Judge reiterated effective immediately they can’t charge the Apple tax of 30% or 27% on app developers, and immediately, companies said that they were going to lower their prices. So there are similarities to what we’d see with search. Mom and pop shops have to invest in advertising as part of their overhead in order to promote the posts to stay at the top of the search page, just to stay relevant. And undoubtedly, those costs get passed down to us.”
On countering Google’s messaging:
“[Google], when the framework was released, they argued that the actions would cause catastrophic harm to the very, ‘fabric of capitalism.’ I mean, can we calm down? They have a chicken little routine – Google and the rest of big tech.”
On national security:
“They say that breakups or any kind of regulation would hurt national security. Well, in addition to what Lee mentioned in that they have a pretty shoddy track record of prioritizing security.”
“Let’s not forget, Google doesn’t break down how much money it makes from China, unlike other tech companies.”
“When companies become monopolies and competition is really a factor, they don’t invest in the research and development the way they should.”
“Google is more interested to me in sitting back and collecting monopoly rent, donating to members of Congress and presidential inaugural funds to buy their way out of lawsuits and protect their monopolies than they are in developing nimble, innovative, market-changing products that help keep America relevant on the world stage and help keep our country secure and competitive globally.”
On Google Gemini:
“Anecdotally, yesterday, I woke up to an email from Google saying that my children will soon have access to Gemini and Gemini apps. My children are three and five.”
“I feel this sense of urgency very deeply because there is a limited amount of time that I have as a parent to protect my children from a sort of runaway monopoly ability to advertise, to target, to surveil, and to give unsolicited content to my children without my knowledge.”
Lee Hepner, Senior Legal Counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project:
On structural remedies:
“The court has an obligation to deny the fruits of monopolization. The notion here is that monopolists don’t get to hang on to the advantages that they derived from being monopolists.”
“In my opinion, it’s not unreasonable for the Justice Department to have demanded remedies that address Google’s control over data centers, over chips, its control over tensor processing units, which is their kind of version of a GPU. I think all of these were subsidized by Google’s revenue derived from its search monopoly, and Sundar Pichai said as much. Third, the court must prevent future monopolization.”
On Google’s defense:
“I think it’s imperative that the court not be deterred by technological complexities and to instead rely on the technological advisory committee to ensure implementation of a structural divestiture in this case.”
On privacy:
“Google does not have the best record on privacy issues historically.”
On national security:
“I don’t think it is the right policy of our country to delegate national security interests to a private corporation. You see [Google] wielding their monopoly to really control the international infrastructure of AI. That is a tremendous amount of power afforded to one company here. I think that is probably a national security vulnerability in and of itself.”
On AI:
“AI isn’t just the evolution of search, it really is search.”
On future of the internet:
“I’m optimistic that we’ll see a democratization of the flow of information across our society.”
Kamyl Bazbaz, Vice President for Public Affairs at DuckDuckGo:
On search market:
“DuckDuckGo has been around for 15 years, and essentially during that entire time, we’ve never had the opportunity to compete on a level playing field.”
“Search itself has been a venture capital dead zone throughout this entire time, because why would anybody invest in search when Google owns every distribution point and you know that scale is a valuable thing to improve your product. . And if you can’t have access to that cycle, why would you invest in a search engine?”
“I think it’s really exciting to think about a future here where users are actually comparison shopping search engines.”
On Google Chrome:
“Chrome has been hostile to DuckDuckGo and other search engines for years and years. If you try to install the DuckDuckGo search extension on Chrome, you get a very scary switchback prompt from Google, a clear dark pattern, trying to get you to turn it off immediately after installing it. And, you know, since the introduction of that sort of dark pattern scare screen, we’ve seen 50% less installs and conversions on Chrome as a result.”
On privacy:
“Google has been using privacy as a shield to avoid really thinking about these remedies and to sort of try and discount them and call them out before they even get started.”
On opening Google’s search index to competitors:
“The whole point here is to give other search engines the building blocks upon which they can innovate and build themselves. And in particular, long tail searches, which is we’ve heard a lot about during the trial are hardest to get and the most important. And so using privacy to avoid giving any meaningful data is pretty wild and sort of sad attempt from Google.”
On Google’s AI Mode:
“I think for folks that are on Google, which are the vast majority of Americans, now that you can switch to AI mode means you never have to try an alternative chatbot. Why would you go to ChatGPT if you have AI mode right there? And so, you can see the monopoly extending in real time.”
On the future of the internet:
“I think it’s important to really push our own thinking and assumptions after being caught in sort of Google’s web for the last 15 years.”
“There is a better version of the internet out there, and we don’t have to succumb to this idea that Google is the only company that can control the information channels that can control what you see online.”