Data played a starring role in the government’s successful antitrust suit against Google accusing it of illegally protecting its monopoly in online search. Now, steps to force Google to unlock its data trove could figure prominently in a ruling on how to address the tech giant’s dominance, antitrust experts say.
On Friday, the federal judge overseeing the case, Amit P. Mehta, will hear closing arguments in federal court in Washington on what corrective measures, known as remedies, he should order to restore competition. The government’s requests include forcing Google to share its search engine results and advertising data with rivals.
Justice Department lawyers have repeatedly described data as “the oxygen” for search engines. And in his ruling against Google in August, Judge Mehta recounted in detail how the company harvests vast amounts of data from user searches and web crawling, then stores and analyzes the data to rule the lucrative market for internet search.
Google, he noted, collects nine times as much user search data every day as all its rivals combined. And as more data is fed into Google’s software, the results that the search engine returns on everything from biology to bluejeans become more accurate and relevant to the person seeking information.
Better search performance, in turn, attracts more users and more advertisers, Judge Mehta wrote. It’s a flywheel that steadily enhances Google’s search and acts as a barrier to competition.
“At every stage in the search process,” the judge wrote, “user data is a critical input that directly improves quality.”