• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 2, 2025

Google said at the ad tech antitrust remedies hearing on Friday it is willing to cooperate with rivals, but some industry executives do not feel that is enough to curtail any future monopoly strategies. 

The changes would mean giving competitors access to real-time bidding data from Google Ad Exchange, its lawyer Karen Dunn said in court, despite arguing that the Department of Justice has no legal basis to force a breakup of its advertising business.

That type of move would harm internet users and lead to a lack of interested buyers, she said, according to Reuters.

Mozilla Chief Financial Officer Eric Muhlheim testified this week, highlighting the potential impacts the case could have on small and independent browsers and the overall ecosystem. 

Executives across advertising and technology appear to be at odds with the remedies. Muhlheim said Firefox users view Google as the best-quality search engine. Mozilla experienced this firsthand when it switched the Firefox browser’s default search engine from Google to Yahoo between 2014 and 2017 to support search competition.

The Tech Oversight Project on Friday hosted a fireside chat about the remedies, with Kyle Morse, deputy executive director at The Tech Oversight Project, introducing the panel’s topic as a way to restore balance.

Doha Mekki, former acting assistant attorney general (AAG), set up the panel by talking about how the U.S. court should prevent or address “flanking monopolies,” preventing a company, not just Google, from dominating an entire market.

In this case monopolistic practices point to advertising, search and artificial intelligence. Remedies also should apply to projects in semiconductor, data centers, and others coming from its monopolistic practices, according to Lee Hepner, California-based antitrust lawyer and Senior Legal Counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project. (Whew!)

Lee spoke about how Google’s lawyers on Thursday described the complexities of spinning off Chrome, which integrates across the entire internet infrastructure.

“We wouldn’t have this argument if were the transportation of coal on a railroad, because we can imagine what a physical divestiture looks like, Hepner said. “The only complication here is that there’s a technological smoke and mirrors argument that somehow it’s impossible in this context even through search and distribution through Chrome is a way it legally maintained this monopoly.”

Chrome has been hostile to DuckDuckGo and other search engines for years, said Kamyl Bazbaz, senior vice president of public affairs at the privacy search engine.

“If you try to install DuckDuckGo search extension in Chrome, you get a very scary switchback prompt from Google, a clear dark pattern, trying to get you to turn it off,” he said. “Since the introduction of that dark pattern, we’ve seen a 50% drop in installs and conversions on Chrome.”

Bazbaz said Google has been using privacy as a shield for the U.S. government to stop thinking about certain remedies like sharing data “is a sad attempt from Google.” He said anonymized data breaks the link between the data and identify of the person.

“If we saw there were one-hundred queries for cute cat pictures we don’t know if separate people or one person clicked on the cat picture one-hundred times,” Bazbaz said.  

He said it’s exciting to think about a future where consumers comparison shop search engines, and with the package of remedies it can be real.

“DuckDuckGo has never been able to compete on a level playing field," he added -- "especially in venture capital, because why would anyone invest in search? Google owns every distribution point, and you know that scale is important to improve your product.”

Bazbaz said each remedy is necessary but not sufficient on its own. Each part needs to work together.