The Doj’s Google Remedy Will Kill, Not Spur, Competition

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has won its case against Google Search. Now it’s proposing remedies that will hinder competition. But isn’t antitrust supposed to do the opposite?

One key remedy the DOJ is pursuing is to force Google to hand over key parts of its search infrastructure—its index of the web, troves of user search data, and its search results pages—to government-selected rivals. And not just at a negotiated fee, but at “marginal cost,” a term that in digital markets often means zero. The goal, according to the DOJ, is to help rivals build viable alternatives to Google Search. In practice, it will do the opposite.

Google’s dominance in search isn’t because it cornered the market unfairly, but because it out-innovated competitors, supplying 80 percent of all searches before engaging in the activities the court found objectionable. As the court acknowledged, Google earned its position by hiring top talent, investing billions, and developing world-leading technology.

The company’s index catalogs hundreds of billions of constantly changing web pages and includes sophisticated metadata—signals of quality, relevance, and user preference—that are essential to providing high-quality results. Its user data is collected and refreshed continuously, at massive scale and cost. And its search results pages integrate links, ads, maps, and other content, often from third parties.

This infrastructure is the product of years of investment, innovation, and refinement. Yet under the DOJ’s plan, firms that failed or refused to create their own infrastructure would be handed Google’s for pennies on the dollar.

The theory behind this policy is not new. In telecom markets in the 1990s, US regulators forced incumbent phone companies to lease their networks to rivals at marginal cost, expecting that the rivals would use this as a steppingstone to build their own infrastructure. They didn’t. The cheaper it was to piggyback on incumbents, the less competitors invested. If it had not been for the emergence of advanced wireless technologies, telecommunications competition might have been a bust, not because the incumbents were too powerful, but because regulators made real competition uneconomical.

That’s what will happen here. If search rivals can build their services as mere veneers on top of Google’s infrastructure—at marginal cost—they’ll have every incentive to do just that, indefinitely. Building a new search index or data pipeline would be financially irrational. The DOJ claims this access to Google resources would be temporary, but history suggests otherwise: once dependence sets in, it’s hard to unwind.

This approach also disincentivizes the very innovation the DOJ says it wants to encourage. If Google is forced to share its crown jewels without meaningful compensation, its incentive to continue improving those assets will drop sharply. Why sink billions into refining your products if rivals get to use them at marginal cost?

Imagine applying the DOJ’s logic to law firms. A top antitrust attorney may charge $1,000 an hour, backed by an Ivy League education, years of underpaid government service, and decades of legal experience. Under the DOJ’s logic, such expertise is deemed too valuable to be hoarded, and such an attorney should provide its legal work product to rival firms at marginal cost—say, $40 an hour, covering incremental clerical and intern support. Would up-and-coming firms bother developing their own talent? Of course not.

But that’s what the DOJ is proposing for Google. The agency doesn’t trust businesses to pursue creative destruction. Instead, the DOJ wants to engineer competitors by decree.

The DOJ’s case focused heavily on Google’s default contracts with Apple, Mozilla, and other partners. The court ruled that Google crossed a line by making these deals too long—two to five years instead of one. Fine. Enforcing limits on exclusivity is a defensible remedy.

But the government’s broader remedy—giving away what Google spent decades building—undermines competition. It punishes success, reduces incentives to invest, and invites an economy of copycats.

Antitrust enforcement should be about helping customers, not handicapping the best firms and keeping lesser rivals on life support. If the government wants better rivals in search, it should embrace an environment where businesses succeed by creating the next breakthrough—not renting yesterday’s at a discount.

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