What a great time to be Google. Not only is it facing only the meekest of punishments for abusing its monopoly of the search market, it is actually now positioned to further entrench its dominance of our information landscape.
This is a perilous moment to be granting one company this much control over global access to knowledge. The Trump administration is conducting an assault on free speech, distributing lists of banned words, detaining and imprisoning students for speech it disagrees with and persecuting the news media and comedians for being insufficiently sycophantic.
Given that, I think there’s a possible future in which the administration starts pressuring Google to shape search results in its favor, just as it has used lawsuits and regulatory pressure against other media outlets whose content it dislikes. Think most recently of how CBS pushed out top news executives as part of a bid to appease President Trump, who had sued the network for what he claimed was deceptive editing of an interview with Kamala Harris.
As the world’s dominant information gatekeeper, Google has the power to suppress or make inaccessible any information it wants — something it already does around the world, including in Thailand, where it blocks content critical of the king, and in Vietnam, where it takes down videos that oppose the government. On its maps, the company has already changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, Mr. Trump’s preferred nomenclature.
It was just this unfettered market power that prompted Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last year to find Google guilty of being an illegal monopolist. In a scathing opinion, he hinted that he might force the company to spin off its web browser Chrome or its mobile operating system Android and would most likely require Google to stop paying billions of dollars to ensure that its search engine is the default on cellphones and web browsers.
Yet this month, Judge Mehta surprisingly concluded that those remedies were unnecessary. Accepting Google’s argument that it is already facing stiff competition from a host of A.I. search companies, he decided it would be enough to require Google only to open up its search data to rivals to help them build their own search engines.
The judge correctly grasped that even well-funded rivals cannot compete with Google’s vast lead in search without having access to some of its data. But he made the terms of data sharing so restrictive that I doubt any meaningful competition will arise from it. Google has to share only a limited amount of data in discrete batches over six years, rather than in the frequent access that competitors say they need.
Even the best-funded A.I. models will not be able to build a viable competitor without frequent access to Google’s data. Google has an unassailable lead in collecting and analyzing data from across the web, and it is constantly crawling the web to update its search engine. Websites welcome Google’s scrapers because they want to show up in Google results — but then they block A.I. companies from doing the same.
Little wonder, then, that the court’s decision has been widely criticized by experts. “The remedies here are unlikely to create the circumstances for competitive entry in search,” said Alissa Cooper, executive director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute, a tech policy research hub.
To his credit, Judge Mehta admitted that he may have gotten it wrong. In the order, he wrote: “Unlike the typical case where the court’s job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts, here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future. Not exactly a judge’s forte.”
He could in fact turn out to be correct that a very narrow technical intervention will be enough to lure competitors into the search market. Still, that is a risky bet. And it’s even riskier in this political moment. We have an administration that is aggressively using its power to try to censor speech. In this environment, the risk of allowing one company to consolidate its role as the gatekeeper of all digital knowledge is extremely unwise.
We need competing search engines that offer different experiences. Here’s a few that I would love to see: A search engine for shopping that crawls the web for the best merchandise rather than just pulling from the sites that list items with Google. Another that puts peer-reviewed scholarly papers at the top of results. Yet another that lets me search from a list of news sources that I get to specify.
And that’s just a start; there are probably even cooler things that entrepreneurs will dream up that I haven’t even thought of yet. But because of Judge Mehta’s decision, we aren’t likely to see any of this innovation. We are more likely to see at most one or two giant competitors like OpenAI and Perplexity get access to Google’s data spigot, but not enough to provide better search results than Google.
That leaves us in the same place we are in right now — where Google is the bottleneck that all information has to get through.
And despite its power in the marketplace, Google is still vulnerable to all kinds of pressure campaigns from the government, which in a separate court case is seeking to spin off some of its ad businesses and has imposed $100,000-per-visa fees for the work authorizations that big tech companies like Google rely on. The government could investigate its use of tax shelters abroad, or the environmental impact of its data centers, or its small but growing defense contracts. It could push Google to remove results for objectionable search terms or suppress political dissent. Imagine if it buried references to Jimmy Kimmel, the comedian who was just in the administration’s cross hairs.
To build the vibrant search ecosystem that we want, Congress must step in to force Google to share more data widely with rivals. And if Congress doesn’t act — which seems likely given its current level of torpor — then it is that much more urgent that we elect new representatives who will unlock the chokehold that one unelected corporation has on our global information landscape.
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Julia Angwin, a contributing Opinion writer and the founder of Proof News, writes about tech policy. You can follow her on Bluesky, Twitter or Mastodon or her personal newsletter.
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