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Jonathan Kanter and his team won two antitrust trials against Google, for the DOJ, of course. He now had more to say about the whole situation, by saying that Google break up would benefit the internet.
Kanter said that to The Verge, during a conversation which was a part of the Decoder show. You can read a transcript of the whole conversation by clicking here, we’ll only focus on the main takeaways here.
Google break up would benefit the internet, says the man who beat Google in court twice
Before we get into it, let’s just note that Kanter’s team won an antitrust case against Google last year, regarding its Search dominance. Google is now in the middle of a three-week remedies trial in relation to that case. On top of that, Kanter and his team also won an ad dominance case vs Google.
There is a real chance that the US government will break up Google in the near future. That could be the result of the current remedies case. Google could be forced to sell Chrome as part of remedies following the court loss. A number of interested parties already stepped up, including OpenAI, Perplexity, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo.
It is worth noting that Jonathan Kanter is no longer working for the Department of Justice. During the conversation, he said that the antitrust case vs Google was years in the making. As a result, Kanter and his team found out that Google has “a dominant position on the tools that sellers use. It owns and has the dominant exchange in the middle, and then Google buys and sells on its own exchange. On top of that, it then rigs the results of those auctions, so it wins more and publishers get less money as a result.”
Kanter admitted that news publishers are critical for the free flow of information, and thus democracy
He also added that “News publishers are critical for the free flow of information, which is vital to democracy, and I think that industry has been under assault for years, in part because the revenue streams have dried up in no small part due to Google’s conduct — in my view and in the view of the court here.”
Kanter was asked for his opinion, how would he break up Google. His answer was interesting. He said that “In these cases, the Department of Justice has asked for Google to sell its Chrome browser, which was critical to the finding in the search case. In the context of ad tech, I think, again, it should not be able to own the buy side and sell side and exchange all at the same time, and I think that anybody who has even a passing familiarity with securities, financial, or commodities markets will tell you that that’s just table stakes.”
Jonathan Kanter admitted that the web may be turning into an AI training data center regardless fo whether there are antitrust remedies, unfortunately. He also admitted that Google will continue being a very significant company even after this case, as did AT&T after its breakup.
Jonathan Kanter had some really interesting answers during the Decoder. You can either check out the transcript of the conversation or listen to it, it’s up to you.
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