• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 17, 2025

Google is receiving support from competitors, saying the U.S. Department of Justice’s proposed remedies would hurt competition rather than improve it.

Earlier this month, Google urged the DOJ not to take a less aggressive approach other than breaking up the search engine company after last year's ruling that the tech giant illegally monopolized online search.

The DOJ filed its proposed remedies in its antitrust win against Google, saying the company should be forced to sell its Chrome web browser and not be allowed to enter into search agreements with other companies, such as Apple and Mozilla.

Google pays Apple and Mozilla to make the company’s search engine the default in Safari and Firefox, respectively. Both companies have come out in favor of keeping the agreements as is.

But the support has come from all types of businesses, from competitors to brands. 

Mozilla in a blog post argued that Google’s search agreements preserve the open web rather than undermining it. The company champions competition and remains an advocate for reforms that create a level playing, and recognizes the DOJ’s efforts to improve search competition for U.S. consumers.

However, Mozilla wrote, it is important to understand that the outcomes of this case will have impacts that extend far beyond any one company or market. 

As written, “the proposed remedies will force smaller and independent browsers like Firefox to fundamentally reexamine their entire operating model. By jeopardizing the revenue streams of critical browser competitors, these remedies risk unintentionally strengthening the positions of a handful of powerful players, and doing so without delivering meaningful improvements to search competition. And this isn’t just about impacting the future of one browser company — it’s about the future of the open and interoperable web.”

Other companies have come out in favor of keeping the status quo.

Grassland Beef, a U.S.-based family-owned farm that grows grass-fed and more sustainable meat, has been running marketing campaigns using Albert AI on Google and Bing search for the last few years.

Yair Polak, head of performance at Zoomd’s Albert.ai division, expected to see changes in performance and conversions achieved by Google Search. But they did not.
Instead, performance increased, and the company has seen similar trends across other clients.

In the third and fourth quarter of 2024, Grassland Beef's reliance on Microsoft Ads and its integration of OpenAI’s technology may have lessened the budget allocation into Google.

Instead, Google’s share of the search budget rose to 84%, resulting in a nearly 50% decrease in the budget for Bing. 

That is a major change from the third and fourth quarters of 2023, when 69% of the company’s search budget ran on Google, with the remaining 31% on Bing.

Albert AI’s technology focused on optimizing campaigns to increase conversions and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Last year, Google search generated nearly 10 times more conversions than Bing search and an effective cost per click (eCPA), nearly one-third lower. 

Albert’s technology leverages AI to optimize cross-channel budget allocation based on keywords, creative, platforms, device selection, and bidding to get the most from KPIs across search, social, display, and cross-channel.