Global tech

not require the U.S. government to pursue the most extreme and legally challenging path of trying to break up the company.

“It doesn’t seem like too much of an imposition on Google’s business model while opening the floodgates to competition a bit,” said Michael Carrier, a law professor at Rutgers University Law School. “The fact that Europe has gone first gives the DOJ a benefit to see how it’s working.”

Google started presenting the search preference menu as a way to comply with Europe’s record 4.34 billion-euro fine in 2018, worth about $4.9 billion today, and demand that the company alter its anti-competitive practices. Google is appealing the ruling.

The search preference menu seeks to address one of the enduring forces in technology: the power of defaults, or predetermined choices, to guide people’s decisions in what internet services they use. The idea is that if people were presented with a convenient way to use a search engine other than Google, they may actually do so.

Google is the default search engine on nearly all of the world’s smartphones. Google is the predetermined option for most handsets with its Android software, which accounts for about 80% of smartphones. For non-Google software phones, the company pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default choice on iPhones.

DuckDuckGo said it has also held discussions with nearly every governmental investigator, including Australia and the United Kingdom, looking into Google about its views on the search preference menu. It has also spoken to state attorneys general who are investigating Google’s online advertising technology and web search businesses.

In a statement, Julie Tarallo McAlister, a Google spokeswoman, said the company continues “to engage with the ongoing investigations led by the Department of Justice” and state attorneys general. “Our focus is firmly on providing services that help consumers, support thousands of businesses and enable increased choice and competition.”

A spokeswoman for Microsoft, which owns Bing, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Yahoo owner Verizon. Brianna Herlihy, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, also declined to comment.

There is precedent for this sort of solution to an antitrust problem. The 2001 settlement that ended the long-running antitrust battle between Microsoft and the federal government included a requirement that users be able to change some of their default software from the company’s own applications, like Internet Explorer, to those designed by competitors.

In 2006, Google told antitrust officials that Microsoft should have to give Internet Explorer users a choice of default search engines when starting the browser.

Bill Baer, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said the agency has in recent years expressed a preference for outcomes in cases or settlements that fundamentally alter a business, like requiring a company to divest aspects of its business.

But when it recently approved the merger of TMobile and Sprint, it complemented that kind of structural solution with additional restrictions on the company’s behavior.

Baer said prosecutors often have settlement discussions even as they prepare for trial and that he would expect something similar to occur in the Google probe.

But rivals have taken issue with how Google has implemented the choice menu in Europe. It is limiting the number of nonGoogle search engine options to three in any country. It is also forcing companies interested in appearing as one of the choices to participate in an auction every three months to bid for how much they are willing to pay each time they are selected as the default option. The three highest bidders appear alongside Google on the menu.

DuckDuckGo said appearing on the menu should be free and that more than four providers should be presented. The company said the current format is not working as it should and will only serve to cement Google’s dominance and line its pockets.

So far, the bidders have not had to pay much since only a limited number of handsets with the menu installed have come out in Europe since March. In fact, DuckDuckGo said it did not pay anything in March or April. Google said the preference menu has appeared in front of new users but declined to specify any figures.

DuckDuckGo said it saw preference menus as a good way to increase competition, if implemented properly. But it said the auction drives up prices, putting smaller companies like it at a disadvantage, and it warned that it may not be able to afford to participate in future auctions.

“A pay-to-play auction is bad for consumers (and competition),” Weinberg said. “Google knows how to work the system, and consumers lose in the end.”