Breaking Up Google Isn’t Nearly Enough

Julia Angwin

Have you looked for a recipe online? If so, you probably found yourself on a blinking hellscape of a web page that was as long as an epic poem, but without any of the insight. First, you get the hokey story about the recipe’s origin. Then there are the videos. The irrelevant ads. The photos of each ingredient. The thousands of words are divided up into sections with headlines like, “Chia Seed Pudding Troubleshooting.”

If you graduated from college anytime before 2010, you may remember a time when websites provided relevant information, and did so swiftly. The reason so many businesses have tortured their web pages into a pulsing, ad-cluttered, endless scroll is because that is what it takes to check all the boxes needed to rank highly in Google search results. The result succeeds in its goal — getting the website to land at the top of Google results — but does little to get you to your goal. And you have little alternative but wade through the morass.

A federal judge recently told us what we already knew: that Google is a monopolist in the Web search market. In his scathing 277-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta noted that Google has an 89.2 percent share of the overall search market and a 94.9 percent share of searches conducted on mobile devices.

Fixing the problem is trickier. Next month, the judge will start deliberations on how to fix an industry that is so thoroughly dominated by one player. It is not going to be easy to jump- start competition in a market where Google has spent decades and billions of dollars quashing rivals.

The judge seems likely to ban the kind of exclusive distribution deals Google long used to make its product the default search engine on Apple phones and in Web browsers such as Firefox. In 2021, Google spent more than $26 billion on these deals. And the Department of Justice is reportedly considering pushing for a breakup of Google — which would stop the company from installing Google search as the default option on its popular Chrome Web browser and Android phones.

Both of those remedies are a good first step, but they aren’t enough. They only address the barriers that competitors would face in marketing a rival search engine. But there are also huge obstacles to anyone who just wants to build one.

Competitors need access to something else that Google monopolizes: data about our searches. Why? Think of Google as the library of our era; the first stop we go to when seeking information. Anyone who wants to build a rival library needs to know what readers are looking for so they can make sure to stock the right books. They also need to know which books are most popular, and which ones people return quickly because they’re no good.

All this information is currently available only to Google. You don’t have to look far for an example of what a search engine without it looks like. If you’ve ever used Microsoft’s Bing you know how even a well resourced company can struggle to provide meaningful results without access to the kind of information Google has about search queries.

Opening up Google search data to competitors is not an new idea. There was a similar concept in broadband, called “open access,” which required some cable and telephone companies to allow competitors to use their lines to provide Internet service. Although it wasn’t uniformly successful, open access allowed for Internet providers such as EarthLink to offer alternatives.

Of course, privacy considerations are involved in releasing data about search queries. Back in 2006, AOL released some search queries to the public for research purposes, and some of the information allowed users to be identified. We have better and more sophisticated privacy protections these days.

If Google were forced to share its data, we could live in as world where numerous competitors offer us different ways to access the world’s knowledge. We could have a privacy-focused search engine, a shopping focused search engine or even a search engine devoted to surfacing high quality news content.

Not only would our search results be better, but all the web pages that are currently optimized for Google — with their long listicle formats — would have to compete on other metrics such as speed and quality.

Building a better Web populated by higher quality pages is a goal we should all shoot for. Forcing Google to open up its data is key to getting us there.