Notes

It’s the data, stupid. In a Washington, D.C., courtroom on August 5, District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google controlled a monopoly on internet search and had engaged in years of illegal acts to thwart competition. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling—emphasizing that the company had exploited its position to charge advertisers well above market rates to place ads against search results. Meanwhile, Google has an 89 percent share of the overall search market and a 95 percent share of the mobile search market in the U.S.—and a 92 percent and 95 percent share globally.

Mehta has given Google and the U.S. administration a deadline of early September to file their recommendations for remedies to the corporation’s search monopoly. He could choose to break Google up—forcing it to split up its search, advertising, and Android phone businesses, for instance—or, say, ban the kind of deals Google struck with Apple to make Google the default search engine on iPhones.

So what’s a judge to do?

Mehta gave little indication in his ruling. Some have compared the case to the government’s courtroom victory over Microsoft in 1999, when the U.S. successfully sued it for abusing the monopoly of its Windows operating system.

But this case is, in at least one important way, unprecedented: Windows was only one operating system among many; Google’s search engine provides vastly better results and dominates the market because it has so much vastly more of the most valuable commodity there is in the digital realm: data—server farms and server farms of data; orders of magnitude more data than any of its competitors.

All this data allows Google to guess better than anyone what people really want when they type in their search queries—and its value to Google illustrates its value across the economy in this digital era: The quantity and quality of data largely determine the capabilities—and profitability—of social media, news media, AI, and advertising today. Those with the best data on their audiences and products have a colossal advantage over their competitors.

In this light, Julia Angwin, a former technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica—now the founder of the nonprofit publication The Markup, covering the effects of technology on contemporary society—suggests a framework for thinking about the question Judge Mehta is facing: If Google had to make its data available to competitors and potential competitors, Angwin says, it would be consistent with the way some telecommunications companies have to make their lines available to others—to enable effective competition among internet providers. And as long as Google doesn’t have to make that data available, she says, there’ll never be real competition in search—no matter what else a judge might impose.

—Michael Bluhm