If you’re a computer user of a certain age, you will remember when you had many choices from which to choose your default search engine. From Infoseek to Ask Jeeves, Lycos to Alta Vista, and even one with the silly name Yahoo!. They had two things in common. They weren’t very good at searching the interwebs and their business model had no path to profitability. Then came Google.

Google is by far the dominant player in the field. It’s not that there aren’t other options, like Bing or Duck, Duck, Go, but it’s not even close. And that makes many people, particularly the government, sad.

A federal judge recently told us what we already knew: that Google is a monopolist in the Web search market. In his scathing 277-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta noted that Google has an 89.2 percent share of the overall search market and a 94.9 percent share of searches conducted on mobile devices.

Is it a crime to produce the best mousetrap such that everybody wants to use yours rather than theirs? There was, of course, more to it than that. Google paid to be the default search engine on iToys, and even though people can easily change search engines, inertia is the foremost quality of Apple users. And if any business stuck its toe on Google’s turf, it would buy it and trash it to eliminate the competition. Whether it was competition, and whether Google would have been the search engine of choice regardless wasn’t the point. Why take chances? What modestly intelligent business doesn’t do whatever it can to solidify its position and protect its profits?

Then again, Google today isn’t the old Google that won the interwebs.

Have you looked for a recipe online? If so, you probably found yourself on a blinking hellscape of a web page that was as long as an epic poem, but without any of the insight. First, you get the hokey story about the recipe’s origin. Then there are the videos. The irrelevant ads. The photos of each ingredient. The thousands of words are divided up into sections with headlines like, “Chia Seed Pudding Troubleshooting.”

Amazingly, with all that, you somehow won’t manage to find whatever it is you’re looking for. But now, having concluded that Google is a monopoly engaging in anti-competitive practices rather than simply being preferred to Bing, Judge Mehta has to come up with a remedy.

The judge seems likely to ban the kind of exclusive distribution deals Google long used to make its product the default search engine on Apple phones and in Web browsers such as Firefox. In 2021, Google spent more than $26 billion on these deals. And the Department of Justice is reportedly considering pushing for a breakup of Google — which would stop the company from installing Google search as the default option on its popular Chrome Web browser and Android phones.

It’s one thing to enjoin Google from buying the rights to be the default search engine and another entirely to break up the company into its component parts, such as separating the business of Google from its Chrome web browser and its Android operating system. After all, how dare a company be successful in expanding into related niches and capturing market share? Yet, this isn’t good enough for some.

Competitors need access to something else that Google monopolizes: data about our searches. Why? Think of Google as the library of our era; the first stop we go to when seeking information. Anyone who wants to build a rival library needs to know what readers are looking for so they can make sure to stock the right books. They also need to know which books are most popular, and which ones people return quickly because they’re no good.

Should the court order Google to give away the data it’s collected that would enable a new entrant into the search engine field the ability to enjoy what Google took decades to accumulate? Why not order Google to make its algorithms open source as well?

Many people believe that Google took advantage of its market position to squash competition and grow into a monopoly. Many believe that it needs to be stopped, particularly now that its search business sucks in comparison to what it was when it was a fledgling company trying to establish its own foothold in the search engine niche. But is the fix breaking up Google? Should it be Google’s responsibility to share its data so others can ramp up quickly, without having to suffer the burden of earning its place in the universe of massively successful internet enterprises?

How do you solve a problem like Google? Would you rather be stuck with Bing?

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