For the past three weeks, the Department of Justice and Google have questioned more than 20 witnesses in an attempt to shake up a federal judge's decision on how to deal with the company's illegal monopoly in internet searches.
That hearing in the District of Columbia U.S. District Court on Friday is expected to reach conclusions. To fix the monopoly, the government proposed aggressive measures, including selling Google the popular Chrome web browser and forcing it to share its own data with competitors. Google claims that small tweaks to business practices are better.
Both sides will provide closing discussions at the end of the month. Judge Amit P. Meta, who presides over the case, is expected to reach a decision by August. His ruling could have a great deal on the way Google, its rivals and people search for information online.
Here's what you need to know about what was discussed at the hearing:
What case does hearing come from?
In August, Judge Mehta determined that Google had violated antitrust laws when it paid billions of dollars to companies like Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to automatically display it as a search engine for browsers and smartphones. He also determined that Google's monopoly could inflate the prices of some search ads and increase the unfair advantage.
Judge Meta convened a hearing last month to determine how to best deal with search monopolies through a measure called treatment. Executives from Google, rival search engines and artificial intelligence companies, along with experts, testified about Google's power on the Internet.
What did the government claim?
The only way to end Google's search is to take important actions, government lawyers said at the hearing.
The lawyers argued that Google should be forced to spin off Chrome and share search results and ads with rivals, allowing them to subscribe to their search engines. Other search engines and some artificial intelligence companies need to access data about what Google users search for and the websites they click on.
During the hearing, the government warned that if Judge Meta does not take action, Google could lead to control of another technology, artificial intelligence. Searches become tumultuous as AI and chatbots change the way they find information on the web, like Google's Gemini.
“This court's remedy should look positive and do not ignore anything on the horizon,” said David Dalkist, the government's leading litigator. “Google uses the same strategy we did for searches and is currently applying it to Gemini.”
“It's the first time in over 20 years in the last two months,” said Eddy Cue, an Apple executive who is called a witness to Google. He attributed this decline to the growth of AI.
What did Google claim?
Google's lawyers said the government's proposal would put products at risk, where consumers love privacy and security for internet browsing, and risk it.
“I think there are definitely a lot of unintended consequences,” testified Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO.
Sharing Google data with competitors undermines user privacy, the company's lawyers said. They pointed out multiple incidents in 2006 when AOL released search data to help academic researchers. Journalists were able to use leaked data to identify individuals based on searches.
They also said there is a lot of competition in AI.
Instead, Google's lawyers suggested that web browsers and smartphone companies would allow them to manipulate more freedom with competing search and AI services. Pichai testified that Google has already changed its contracts with other companies, consistent with the case's proposal.
(The New York Times sued Openai and its partner Microsoft over copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. They denied fraud.)
What did other companies say?
During the hearing, several Google competitors, including the confusion of Openai and Chatbot Company, said they would be open to buying Chrome if Chrome were sold. Government witnesses said access to Google's search and advertising data would bring benefits to AI companies as they tried to compete with Google.
What did the judge say?
When Judge Meta asked the witnesses through the hearing, he provided a window into his thoughts.
Sometimes he urged witnesses to tell them whether rivals could compete with Google's search control without court intervention.
Many of his questions revolved around AI and its importance. Google fought against its rivals and developed the technology that has become a major force in the tech industry.
When Pichai was in the witness position, Judge Meta said he had observed the rapid development of AI since the case went to trial in the fall of 2023, indicating that he was aware that technology growth had become the backdrop of the hearing.
“One of the things that Pichai hit me about these cases was that when we were together so long ago, consistent testimony from witnesses was that the combined AI and search or the impact on AI searches had been apart for years.” “By the time we were here today, things had changed dramatically.”
