The overwhelming majority of Americans use Google’s search engine everyday, whether to check sports scores, read the news(headlines), understand weird health symptoms or look for a myriad of other things. Despite these habits being a consumer choice due to the product’s superior quality (who wants to “Bing” something?), the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Google on the grounds of monopolizing online search through its exclusivity agreement with Apple. And the federal government won their case in DC’s district court.
While Google appeals the ruling, the district judge prepares to issue his finalized remedies to this verdict. The DOJ, now under the leadership of Assistant Attorney General of the Antitrust Division Gail Slater, continues to pursue harsh court-ordered structural changes including a full divestiture of the Chrome browser, a termination of the partnership with Apple and free access to its search and advertisement data.
This is going to hurt consumers.
New iPhone prices are already expected to surge amid the tariff-induced trade war, and now the luxury of Apple products will be reduced to clunky, early 2000s-tiered search technology because of politics. The simplicity of Google will be ruined. And why? Because some people are upset that private corporations have no legal responsibility to guarantee you equal ideological footing on their platforms.
To clear the air, Google poses no threat to free speech nor digital innovation as Slater alleges. TheFirst Amendment protects against the government creating any law abridging the freedom of speech, not the free market policing its own property — whether that be a university, hotel or online community. While this may be confusing due to the legal ties that federal funding may come with, it is very clear in the private sector: Google, Marriott or any other business has no responsibility to afford you widespread “freedom of speech” in their spaces. Even if, in the spirit of American culture, they tend to do so and we’d like them to.
Likewise, Google’s search engine and its contract with Apple does not preclude competitors or new startups from grabbing a bigger share of the market. Users are still free to use Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and others instead — even if Apple devices initially preload Google search results. Any of these platforms could offer the fruit-named company a counter offer to replace Google.
But in 2025, businesses prefer to work through the legal, legislative and regulatory process as opposed to engaging in true marketplace sparring. Rather than duel it out for the public’s support, they can circumvent all of that and win government favors to secure higher profits, greater market share and more.
Originally created to protect consumers from anti-competitive conduct by companies, antitrust has been twisted to punish companies for being too successful or ideologically inconvenient. In this case, the prior administration advanced the case against Google on the grounds of the company being simply “too big”. Now, despite a change in partisan control, the DOJ and FTC continue to challenge the tech giant due to legitimate criticisms of conservative dissident speech being restricted.
At its root, this case scrutinizes the Google-Apple partnership as hindering competition. But terminating that agreement, or taking more extreme measures, won’t create competition. Users of Apple devices can already change their default search engine or just freely load those platforms in the first place.
If another search engine is better, consumers will flock to it. But for the time being, nobody has created a product to beat Google. Artificial intelligence platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGBT already are taking over a large chunk of the functions served by search engines like Google. Forcing change from the top down is unnecessary and will only backfire. Tech innovation moves fast; government micromanagement doesn’t. The United States should let people decide what they want to use — just like we always have.
