Tim Wu Wants a Hanging Judge for Google

August 15, 2024

Tim Wu took to the pages of The New York Times to suggest the punishments – I mean remedies – he wants Judge Amit Mehta to inflict on Google for monopolistic behavior. None of Wu’s punishments involve the Iron Maiden, but they are predictably extreme.

Wu harks back to the remedies imposed on AT&T in an antitrust action in 1956 that required that company to stay out of computing and to offer its almost 8,000 technology patents for free. Wu writes “That remedy was a blockbuster that gave rise to a new generation of companies that developed two essential American industries: general-purpose computing and semiconductors.” True enough.

Similarly, Wu would like to see Google divest from its Chrome web browser and its Android operating system for mobile devices. In this way, Wu writes, Google controls the “choke points” – the places where we download software, like the browser or the phone. He would also force Google to give away all its AI technologies, just as AT&T was forced to give up its patents. He writes: “This would be the most like the 1956 AT&T decree, leveling the playing field and giving newcomers a chance to build competing products …”

But wait a minute – isn’t Google struggling to compete with ChatGPT in a crowded field of cutthroat AI competitors, or did I dream that? Google also doesn’t control “choke points” that somehow make it harder to download Apple software or buy an iPhone or a Samsung, or to find them in search. If it did, that would border on a crime. And Google could not be more different from the old Bell System. The Willis Graham Act of 1921 treated AT&T as a “natural monopoly” with exclusive access to the nation’s phone lines in exchange for the promise of universal service. AT&T retained its monopoly for more than 60 years. No one offered Larry Page and Sergey Brin a deal like that when they were mucking around a computer science lab at Stanford University.

Why, then, did Google become so successful? Wu himself hints at the reason. He acknowledges that “a remedy that attempts to restore competition in search by forcing users to click through multiple search-engine alternatives would most likely be ineffective and annoying – worse than the status quo.”

On this point, Wu is right. Google did a better job at search and most people now go to that one place where they know they can benefit from all the data from the other users. To put it simply, everyone uses Google because everyone uses Google. This has been a remarkable achievement, one that places much of human knowledge at the fingertips of billions of people. But never mind, Wu is sanguine about the government compelling the destruction of that achievement. He quotes the fictional evil prime minister, Francis Urquhart, in the House of Cards: “Nothing lasts forever. Even the longest, the most glittering reign must come to an end someday.”

Because I too have Google, I can find an Urquhart quote of my own: “Politics requires sacrifice. The sacrifice of others, of course.” Here’s to hoping that Judge Mehta applies more fairness and a better grasp of history when he announces remedies after hearings in September.