US v. Google: all the news from the search antitrust showdown

6 days ago 5

Google’s lawyer is up.
Closing arguments have moved to Google’s side. Google’s attorney is arguing over where Google’s conduct does and doesn’t meet the appropriate standard for an antitrust violation — which could determine what concessions the company is forced to make.
Lots of AI questions to the DOJ.
Judge Amit Mehta just wrapped up a long line of questioning about how generative AI should play into the search trial. “We spent a lot of time in this remedies phase talking about AI,” Mehta began. “There’s an argument to be made perhaps that all that is not relevant because it’s not a market that was discussed during the liability phase.” Mehta asked Dahlquist to defend why a tool like Gemini should be considered part of the overall search market, not something separate and new. Dahlquist, in turn, emphasized that AI “is a new search access point. That is a gateway to search.”
“Google’s self-reinforcing monopoly machine.”
DOJ attorney David Dahlquist is laying out the governments’ case for changes that would help “pry open the market to competition” in search. He’s accused Google of providing “milquetoast remedies that it knows will maintain the status quo,” instead mainly arguing in preparation for its appeal.
Closing arguments in the Google search antitrust trial.
Closing arguments are starting in US v. Google, the antitrust trial that could determine whether Google is forced to sell its Chrome browser and dramatically change its search business. We’re not in court today, but we’re listening on a dial-in line for this final stage of the trial.
Google rejected giving publishers more choice to opt out of AI Search
Google didn’t want to give publishers the choice to keep their content out of AI Search results because it’s “evolving into a space for monetisation.” That’s according to a newly disclosed internal document, spotted by Bloomberg, which reveals that Google had discussed offering publishers more granular control over how website data would be used in AI Search features instead of the illusion of choice they eventually received.
The document, written by Google Search executive Chetna Bindra, was released during the US antitrust trial into Google’s online search monopoly. The access to its search engine data gives Google a huge advantage in AI development over rivals like Perplexity and OpenAI. But Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode can be detrimental to the websites they source from by reducing clickthroughs, incentivizing publishers to keep their content out of AI summaries and related features if given the choice.
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Eddy Cue is fighting to save Apple’s $20 billion paycheck from Google
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge
Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo probably won’t disrupt Google’s dominance in search, said Apple senior vice president of services Eddy Cue — but AI services easily could.
Cue was returning to a courtroom in Washington, DC where he last testified in the Justice Department’s trial against Google’s search monopoly in September 2023. During the current remedies trial on Wednesday, Cue said that in the time since, well-funded generative AI upstarts have made such significant advancements that they could ultimately disrupt that monopoly — perhaps more effectively than the court could.
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Apple’s Eddy Cue: ‘You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now’
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, gave an ominous warning today that the iPhone could go the way of the iPod 10 years from now. And the reason, as one might guess, is artificial intelligence.
Cue’s remarks came during the Google Search antitrust remedies trial today while discussing how AI has the potential to reshape the tech industry and open the door to new entrants.
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Google searches are falling in Safari for the first time ever — probably because of AI
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
Google searches fell in Safari for the first time ever last month, Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, said during Google’s antitrust trial on Wednesday. “That has never happened in 22 years,” Cue added.
Cue linked the dip in searches to the growing use of AI, which the company is now considering putting into Safari. The rise of web search in AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot may make users less inclined to visit Google as their primary way of finding information.
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Apple is looking at adding Perplexity and other AI search engines to Safari
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
Apple is “actively looking at” bringing AI search options to Safari. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, made the statement during Google’s antitrust trial on Wednesday, saying the company will likely add AI search features to Safari in the coming year as they continue to improve.
“To date, they’re just not good enough,” Cue said, adding that Apple has already had discussions with Perplexity, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Cue is mindful that it’s still early days for generative AI, and says that with Apple’s existing agreement with OpenAI for other AI services, it was important to “make sure we have the capability to switch if we have to,” in case a different provider leaps ahead.
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DOJ’s proposed Google changes would ‘deeply undermine user trust,’ search chief says
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
The government’s proposal to make Google share its search data with competitors would “deeply undermine user trust” by putting queries in the hands of potentially less secure rivals, the company’s search chief Elizabeth Reid testified Tuesday.
The Justice Department has proposed forcing Google to syndicate its ranking signals and other search data to competitors, something it says will level the playing field and end Google’s search monopoly. But Reid argued that exporting that data would shake users’ faith that their searches would stay private, and its value would create an incentive for hackers to go after small competitors. “Once it’s turned over to a qualified competitor, there’s no further protections we can give,” she said. “A startup is generally not a target because it’s small, but now it has this huge treasure trove of data.”
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Publisher opt-outs of AI training cut Google’s DeepMind training data in half.
During its Search antitrust trial yesterday, a DOJ attorney produced a document showing that “80 billion of 160 billion ‘tokens’ — snippets of content — after filtering out the material that publishers had opted out of allowing Google to use for training its AI,” according to Bloomberg.
But that opt-out only applies to DeepMind models, Bloomberg reports — when asked if “the search org has the ability to train on the data that publishers had opted out of training,” DeepMind VP Eli Collins replied, “Correct — for use in search.”
Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive
Image: Mozilla
Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the Justice Department’s proposals to restrict Google’s search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. “It’s very frightening,” Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.
The DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals. The court has already ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in search, partly thanks to exclusionary deals that make it the default engine on browsers and phones, depriving rivals of places to distribute their search engines and scale up. But while Firefox — whose CFO is testifying as Google presents its defense — competes directly with Chrome, it warns that losing the lucrative default payments from Google could threaten its existence.
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Sundar Pichai says the DOJ’s antitrust plan could kill Google Search
Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, took the stand on Wednesday during the remedies phase of the company’s search antitrust trial, and offered a simple message. The US government’s plan to rectify Google’s search monopoly, he said, would be so crushing to Google Search that it might be hard to justify continuing to build a search engine at all.
Pichai was called by Google in its defense, the second witness in its portion of the trial after the Department of Justice finished more than a week of its own questioning. John Schmidtlein, one of Google’s lead attorneys, first led Pichai through a tour of Google’s R&D investments, asking him how much the company has spent on Search, AI, and other projects. (The answer: about $49 billion just last year.) Then he asked Pichai about the government’s proposal to require Google to share much of its search data, and its search index, with competitors at a “marginal cost.”
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Google confirms it’s close to getting Gemini support on iPhones
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge
Google is close to striking a deal with Apple to integrate Gemini into the iPhone. During the search monopoly trial on Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed the company expects to strike a Gemini deal with Apple by the middle of this year and suggested it would roll out by the end of 2025.
The integration would presumably allow Siri to call on Gemini to answer more complex questions, similar to the integration that Apple launched with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi hinted at plans to build Gemini into its Apple Intelligence feature last June, when the AI service was first announced. “We want to enable users ultimately to choose the models they want, maybe Google Gemini in the future,” Federighi said at the time.
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Tough day in court for Google Plus and Google Buzz.
First, Sundar Pichai used Google Plus to explain how the best product usually wins — as an example of a time Google lost. “I think I’m comfortable saying it wasn’t the best product out on the market,” he said. And laughed! A few minutes later, an FTC case against Google’s other terrible social network, Google Buzz, came up as an example of Google being bad for user privacy. Yet another tough day in Google social networking.
Sundar Pichai says the remedies against Google would be a crushing blow.
Google’s CEO has talked on the stand about Chrome and Chromium, and shouted out RCS and web standards, but he’s also said over and over that if Google is forced to share its search index, search data, and even search results with competitors, it might kill the value of Google Search.
“It makes it unviable to invest in R&D the way we have for the last two decades on Google Search... I think it will have many unintended consequences.”
It’s Sundar time in US v. Google.
In the Google Search remedies trial, the government is done arguing its case and now Google is getting started. Today’s first witness: CEO Sundar Pichai, who also led the Chrome team at the very beginning. I suspect we’re about to hear a lot about why Chrome exists, why it matters to Google — and why Pichai wants it to stay part of Google.
Chrome could suffer apart from Google, says Google.
Testifying in the Google Search antitrust trial yesterday, Chrome general manager Parisa Tabriz said Chrome’s features and functionality owe to its “interdependencies” on other parts of the company, reports Bloomberg. She reportedly said over 90 percent of Chromium code has originated from Google since 2015.
Noting Android’s reliance on Chromium, Bloomberg writes that earlier in the day, a computer science expert for the DOJ said even if it sold Chrome, Google would be motivated “to make sure the source code is well-maintained.”
Google is paying Samsung an ‘enormous sum’ to preinstall Gemini
Testimony this week from Google’s antitrust trial shows that Google gives Samsung an “enormous sum of money” each month to preinstall the Gemini AI app on Samsung devices, reports Bloomberg. Now that Judge Amit Mehta has ruled Google’s search engine is an illegal monopoly, its lawyers are sparring with the DOJ over how severe a potential penalty should be.
Peter Fitzgerald, Google’s vice president of platforms and device partnerships, testified on Monday that Google’s payments to Samsung started in January. That’s after Google was found to have violated antitrust law, partially due to similar arrangements with Apple, Samsung, and other companies for search. When Samsung launched the Galaxy S25 series in January, it also added Gemini as the default AI assistant when long-pressing the power button, with its own Bixby assistant taking a back seat.
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Why are companies lining up to buy Chrome?
Image: The Verge
Chrome could eventually be up for sale, if the US Department of Justice gets its way in the remedies trial for US v. Google. And there are already buyers lining up at Google’s door.
Any potential sale might not happen for a very long time. The remedies trial is still ongoing, a decision in that trial isn’t expected for quite awhile, and Google has already said it will appeal, which will definitely add more time to the process and could ultimately reverse a ruling where Google might have been forced to sell the browser.
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Yahoo wants to buy Chrome
Image: The Verge
Legacy search brand Yahoo has been working on its own web browser prototype, and says it would like to buy Google’s Chrome if the company is forced by a court to sell it.
The information came out during the fourth day of the Justice Department’s remedies trial to rectify Google’s search monopoly. The DOJ has — among other proposals — requested Judge Amit Mehta break up Google by requiring it sell its Chrome browser, which the agency says is a key distribution channel for its popular search engine that’s amassed too much power for anyone else to compete. Yahoo isn’t the only company interested in buying Chrome. While DuckDuckGo’s CEO said they wouldn’t be able to afford it, witnesses from Perplexity and OpenAI both expressed interest in the popular browser on the stand this week.
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Perplexity wants to buy Chrome if Google has to sell it
Image: The Verge
Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko said he didn’t want to testify in a trial about how to resolve Google’s search monopoly because he feared retribution from Google. But after being subpoenaed to appear in court, he seized the moment to pitch a business opportunity for his AI company: buying Chrome.
If Judge Amit Mehta sees things the way the Justice Department does, he could force Google to spin out its popular web browser — including the free open source Chromium browser that many other web browsers are built on. Google says this remedy is playing with fire, and could result in a new Chromium owner charging for the product or failing to keep it running in an adequate way, causing ripple effects across the browser industry.
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Money, Chrome, and ChatGPT: The high stakes of Google’s monopoly trial
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
Near the beginning of his opening arguments, David Dahlquist, a lawyer for the US Department of Justice, showed a slide that he described as Google’s “vicious cycle.” It goes like this: Google pays billions of dollars to be the default search engine practically everywhere, thus it gets more search queries, thus it gets better data, thus it is able to improve its results, thus it makes more money, thus it can afford more defaults. Google doesn’t really disagree with this assessment — but in its telling, that’s a virtuous cycle. Google believes it’s created a perfect system; the DOJ thinks it’s a nightmare. A judge will make the final call.
Dahlquist’s remarks were the opening salvo of the remedies phase of US v. Google, a landmark antitrust case that ended with judge Amit Mehta finding last year that Google’s search engine is a monopoly. The question in the courtroom this time, to be litigated over the next two weeks, is what to do to fix it. And according to Dahlquist, the process has to start by stopping every part of the cycle from spinning.
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The Department of Justice really, really wants Google to sell Chrome.
My big question coming into this remedies trial was how serious the government was about making Google divest Chrome. It’s a swing, and seemed like maybe a negotiating tactic. But in opening arguments it became clear that getting Chrome out of Google is very much part of the goal. So far, judge Amit Mehta seems skeptical of the idea, but Jonathan Sallet, a lawyer representing the states, argued that something has to be done with maybe the most-used app on the planet:
“This kind of asset — 4 billion users — does not come up very often for potential companies to acquire.”
The future of Google Search is back in court.
I’m here in the DC District Court for the remedies phase of the US v. Google trial, which found Google to be a monopoly in search. David Dahlquist, the lawyer for the Department of Justice, just showed a slide of Google’s “vicious cycle” — Defaults, Searches, Data, Quality, Money — and said he intends to offer a plan to unwind the cycle piece by piece. It’s gonna be an intense next few weeks.