Judge Amit P. Mehta has some tough decisions to make about Google.
That much was clear on Friday as the federal judge, who sits on the U.S. District Court in Washington, peppered lawyers for the Justice Department and the tech company with questions during closing arguments over about how best to fix the company’s search monopoly. The conclusion of the three-week hearing means the decision will now be in the hands of the judge, who is expected to issue a ruling by August.
The government has asked the court to force Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, and share the data behind its search results with rivals. The company has countered with a far narrower proposal.
Judge Mehta, who ruled last year that the company had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in search, quickly turned his attention Friday to artificial intelligence, which many tech experts expect to upend search. Given that A.I. products are already changing the tech industry, the judge said he was grappling with questions about whether the proposals could lead a new challenger to “come off the sidelines and build a general search engine.”
“Does the government believe that there is a market for a new search engine to emerge” as we think of one today, he asked. The government argued that A.I. products were connected to the future of search.
Judge Mehta’s ruling could reshape a company synonymous with online search at a pivotal moment. Google is in a fierce race with other tech companies, including Microsoft, Meta and the startup OpenAI, to convince consumers to use generative A.I. tools that can spit out humanlike answers to questions. Judge Mehta’s ruling could directly hamper Google’s efforts to develop its own A.I. or offer a leg up to its competitors as they race to build their own new versions of A.I.-powered search.
In addition, Judge Mehta’s decision will signal whether the government’s recent push to rein in the biggest tech companies through a series of antitrust lawsuits can result in significant changes to the way they do business.
The Justice Department is also pursuing a breakup of Google after winning a case earlier this year over its monopoly in some portions of the advertising technology business, and it has sued Apple on the grounds the company makes it difficult for consumers to ditch the iPhone. The Federal Trade Commission squared off against Meta in a trial this spring over claims it snuffed out nascent rivals and has also sued Amazon, arguing the company squeezes small sellers that use its site.
The Justice Department and a group of states filed the case over Google search in 2020, under the first Trump administration. They argued at a 2023 trial that Google had boxed out competitors by paying billions to companies like Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to automatically display the Google search engine on smartphones and in web browsers.
As Google used those deals to attract more users, it gathered more data and made its search engine better, locking in an advantage over alternatives like Microsoft’s Bing.
Judge Mehta agreed. In a landmark ruling in August, he said that Google “is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
For three weeks starting April 21, the judge held a hearing to determine how he should address that problem.
Lawyers for the government argued that Google, without significant intervention by the court, would be able to parlay its dominance in online search into dominance in A.I.-powered search. Google had already started using the same search-boosting playbook to enhance its A.I. chatbot Gemini, they said. The government called witnesses from OpenAI, which makes the ChatGPT chatbot, and search rivals who said that access to Google’s search data would help them compete.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, testified that consumers were already using A.I. chatbot apps to search for information instead of going through Apple’s web browser, Safari, which automatically pulls up Google.
“The reason why we’re seeing less searches already in Safari is because people are downloading these apps, they are already doing this,” he said. “But they do have to get better.”
Google countered during the hearing that the government’s proposal would constitute a huge legal overreach and endanger products that are good for consumers. The company said the judge should instead focus on the deals with Apple, Samsung and others, by requiring Google to give those companies more flexibility than in earlier versions of the agreements.
On Friday, the Justice Department’s lead lawyer, David Dahlquist, opened by saying that the government wanted to “pry open competition.”
“Rather than provide this court with remedies designed to restore competition, Google presented this court with milquetoast remedies that it knows will maintain the status quo,” Mr. Dahlquist said. “But try as it might, Google cannot escape the facts of this case.”
But Judge Mehta quickly pushed Mr. Dahlquist to defend the government’s core argument that the court should take steps to ensure that Google could not dominate the competition for A.I.
Judge Mehta noted that A.I. had hardly come up during the 2023 trial to determine whether Google had broken the law, and questioned how he should think about the new technology in relation to the monopoly he found that Google held over general online search services.
“We spent a lot of time in this remedies phase talking about A.I.,” he said. “If it’s not part of the search market, how is it associated with the legal framework, with the remedies that you’re asking for?”