DOJ's extreme proposals will hurt consumers and America's tech leadership

The remedies hearing in the Department of Justice’s case against Google Search wrapped up this week. We have been posting summaries week by week:

Here’s what we learned:

DOJ's proposals ignore the immense competition across the industry.

• DOJ’s case ignores how intense competition has transformed the industry. Well-funded services like ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity and MetaAI are rapidly gaining users and distribution, and adding innovations at a breakneck pace. Evidence at trial showed OpenAI believes “it has what it needs to win.”
• Our ability to enter into promotional agreements isn’t holding back this new generation of competition. Apple recently chose to feature ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence, while Motorola has already integrated Perplexity and Microsoft’s CoPilot into its new Razr devices.

DOJ’s proposals would leave consumers with worse experiences and fewer choices.

• Apple’s SVP of Services Eddy Cue said Apple chooses to feature Google because it’s “the best search engine” and that it keeps improving with new innovations like AI Overviews. In contrast, DOJ’s proposals would make it harder for people to get the search engine they prefer.
• DOJ’s proposals would also hurt widely used browsers, leaving consumers with fewer choices. Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said the DOJ’s proposals would harm browser competition and “put Firefox out of business.”

Mandating data disclosures would threaten Americans’ privacy.

• Privacy expert Dr. Chris Culnane testified that DOJ’s proposals demand even more data than Europe’s Digital Markets Act, threatening to reveal people’s personal information and behavior, and threatening widespread privacy breaches. The Software Industry Information Association wrote that “[i]t’s virtually certain that forced sharing of search data will expose users and the internet ecosystem to untold privacy and security risks.”
• Even a witness from Microsoft — the company that stands to gain the most from DOJ’s proposals — admitted that “privacy concerns are not made up.”

De facto divestiture would hold back innovation at a critical juncture.

• While we’re at a key moment in the global technology race, Sundar Pichai testified that the DOJ’s proposals amount to a “de facto divestiture” of Search, and VP of Search Liz Reid confirmed that they would “significantly hamper” innovation. While Google spends billions every year on R&D – $49 billion last year alone – DOJ’s proposal to confiscate the benefit of those innovations would reduce incentives for future investment.
• University of Chicago economist Dr. Kevin Murphy found that forced sharing of data and intellectual property would reduce incentives for rivals to innovate. As Murphy explained, “shortcutting to get to the end” usually doesn’t work out the way you want it to, making it more likely that rivals would seek to clone Google rather than doing their own differentiated innovation.

Divesting Chrome would break it — and many other things.

• DOJ’s proposal to break off Chrome — which billions of people use for free — would break it and result in a "shadow of the current Chrome,” according to Chrome leader Parisa Tabriz. She added that the browser would likely become “insecure and obsolete.” Open Web Advocacy and a wide range of voices agreed that it would do more harm than good.
• Columbia University Professor Jason Nieh testified that breaking off Chrome would be “highly challenging” since it's deeply integrated into Google’s infrastructure. And the result would degrade products like Safe Browsing, ChromeOS, the open-source Chromium project and more.
• Google cybersecurity chief Heather Adkins warned that severing Chrome from Google's security infrastructure would expose billions of people to cyber-attacks.

DOJ’s proposals would help competitors, not consumers.

Over weeks of testimony, we heard from a series of well-funded companies eager to gain access to Google’s technology so they don’t have to innovate themselves. What we didn’t hear was how DOJ’s extreme proposals would benefit consumers — which is what American antitrust law is all about.

As the legal process continues, we will continue to advocate for helpful, innovative products that work for everyone.