For the past three weeks, the Justice Department and Google have questioned more than two dozen witnesses to try to sway a federal judge’s decision over how to address the company’s illegal monopoly in internet search.
On Friday, that hearing concluded in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. To fix the monopoly, the government has proposed aggressive measures that include forcing Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser and share proprietary data with competitors. Google has argued that small tweaks to its business practices would be more appropriate.
Both sides will offer closing arguments at the end of the month. Judge Amit P. Mehta, who is presiding over the case, is expected to reach a decision by August. His ruling could have significant implications for Google, its rivals and the way that people look for information online.
Here’s what to know about what was argued at the hearing.
What case does the hearing stem from?
In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google had broken antitrust law when it paid companies like Apple, Samsung and Mozilla billions of dollars to automatically appear as the search engine in browsers and on smartphones. He also ruled that Google’s monopoly allowed it to inflate the prices for some search ads, adding to its unfair advantage.
Judge Mehta convened the hearing last month to determine how to best address the search monopoly through measures called remedies. Executives from Google, rival search engines and artificial intelligence companies — alongside experts — testified about Google’s power over the internet.
What did the government argue?
The only way to end Google’s dominance in search is by taking significant action, government lawyers said at the hearing.
Lawyers argued that Google should be forced to spin off Chrome and share search results and ads with rivals, allowing them to populate their own search engines. Other search engines and some artificial intelligence companies should get access to data on what Google users search for, as well as the websites they click on.
The government warned during the hearing that if Judge Mehta didn’t take action, it could propel Google into dominance of another technology, artificial intelligence. Search is in upheaval as A.I. and chatbots, like Google’s Gemini, change the way people find information on the web.
“This court’s remedy should be forward looking and not ignore what’s on the horizon,” said David Dahlquist, the government’s lead litigator. “Google is using the same strategy that they did for search and now applying it to Gemini.”
Eddy Cue, an Apple executive called as a witness by Google, said that “in the past two months for the first time in over 20 years,” Google search queries had declined in the company’s Safari browser. He attributed the drop to the growth of A.I.
What did Google argue?
Google’s lawyers said the government’s proposal would endanger products that consumers love and imperil privacy and security for internet browsing.
“I think it definitely will have many unintended consequences,” testified Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive.
Sharing Google’s data with its competitors would undermine the privacy of its users, the company’s lawyers said. They pointed multiple times to a 2006 incident in which AOL released search data to aid academic researchers. Journalists were able to use leaked data to identify an individual based on her searches.
There’s also plenty of competition in A.I., they said, noting the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other examples.
Google’s lawyers instead proposed that its contracts with web browsers and smartphone companies should offer more freedom to work with competing search and A.I. services. Mr. Pichai testified that Google had already started altering its contracts with other companies to align with its proposal in the case.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. They have denied wrongdoing.)
What did other companies say?
During the hearing, several Google competitors, including OpenAI and the chatbot company Perplexity, said they would be open to buying Chrome if it was put up for sale. Government witnesses said access to Google’s search and ad data would give A.I. companies an advantage as they tried to compete with Google.
What did the judge say?
When Judge Mehta questioned witnesses throughout the hearing, he provided a window into his thinking.
At times, he pushed witnesses to say whether any rivals could compete with Google’s search dominance absent the court’s intervention.
Many of his questions revolved around A.I. and its significance, as Google battles its rivals to develop the technology that has become a major force in the tech industry.
When Mr. Pichai was on the witness stand, Judge Mehta said he had observed the rapid development of A.I. since the lawsuit went to trial in the fall of 2023, signaling he was aware of how the growth of the technology had become the backdrop for the hearing.
“One of the things that has struck me, Mr. Pichai, about these proceedings is, when we were together not so long ago, the consistent testimony from the witnesses was that the integration of A.I. and search or the impact of A.I. on search was years away,” he said, referring to testimony during the 2023 trial. “By the time we’ve gotten here today, things have changed dramatically.”
