Google Pushed to Perfection: US Demands Higher Quality Products
According to internal documents disclosed in the US Justice Department’s monopolization case against Google, the tech giant only took steps to improve the quality of its search engine in the European Union after facing a substantial antitrust fine. This comes as Google faces criticism in court for allegedly relying on its dominant market position.
The Justice Department argues in a lawsuit in Washington that Google’s failure to improve its products — unless pressured — shows it is illegally maintaining its monopoly.
Alphabet Inc’s Google planned to improve its European search results only after a record 2018 European antitrust lawsuit, according to documents that revealed Google executives discussed a plan called “Go Big in Europe.” The plan aimed to improve results in France and Germany in 2019 and 2020 by, among other things, adding post-match soccer video highlights, adding local content and news, pronunciation practices for different languages, and adding information about local streaming options.
The catalyst was an EU antitrust ruling in 2018 that forced Google to provide a checkbox where Android phone users could choose from five search engine options, according to US competition authorities investigating the case.
“‘Go Big in Europe’ is product investment that goes beyond business as usual to keep Google in the minds of EU users,” one DOJ affidavit released in 2020 showed.
Google planned to hire more than 80 new employees and spend more than $200 million on the initiative, according to additional documents filed in court last week. The plan was to roll out the updates later in Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen” at the selection screen, testified Ben Gomes, then head of Google’s search team. “This was to try to find out what would happen.”
In the antitrust lawsuit, now in its ninth week, the Justice Department alleges that Google illegally maintained a monopoly on Internet search by paying billions of dollars a year — up to $26 billion in 2021 — to be the default search engine in web browsers. and mobile phones.
Google has denied the allegations, saying it spends billions of dollars on research and development each year and has incorporated new technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve results. Google declined to comment on the “Go Big in Europe” initiative or how much it has been implemented.
In his testimony, Gomes rejected the idea that Google made the improvements only in response to the EU opt-out screen. “We were investing in Europe all along,” he said. “We are investing in these countries in a very big way.”
With the selection screen, Google wanted to introduce “new visible things that we could use in marketing campaigns,” he said. “Some of these things, like football and so on, may be more attractive in terms of marketing to other people who are marketing things to us.”
Google developed the selection screen in 2019 to ease EU competition concerns after the bloc’s regulators urged the company to stop crowding out rivals in the mobile search market. Google has a final appeal pending at the EU’s highest court, where it is asking to either overturn the EU’s 2018 decision or cut the fine to a “significantly lower amount”.
In 2021, Google abandoned the original checkbox, which failed to address EU concerns. The current version offers access to the most popular search engines in European countries.
The Android case was one of a series of antitrust clashes between the EU competition authority and the search engine giant that have already led to more than 8 billion euros ($8.8 billion) in fines for abuses on other Google services.
The Justice Department’s top economic expert, Michael Whinston, offered evidence of how the checkbox affected Google’s market share in several European countries. Based on European switching rates, he estimates that if there was a check box in the US, only about 10% of US users would switch to another search engine.
