Breaking Up Google Isn’t Nearly Enough

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. Fixing the problem will be tricky. While Mehta will likely ban exclusive distribution deals Google uses to make its product the default search engine, that only addresses one barrier to competition. Competitors need access to something else that Google monopolizes: data about our searches. If you’ve ever used Microsoft’s Bing you know how even a well-resourced company can struggle to provide meaningful results without access to the kind of information Google has about search queries. If Google were forced to share its data, we could live in as world where numerous competitors offer us different ways to access the world’s knowledge. Building a better Web populated by higher quality pages is a goal we should all shoot for. Forcing Google to open up its data is key to getting us there.

[Julia Angwin is an investigative reporter the founder of Proof News.]