Antitrust officials want to sell Google for parts

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Justice Department wants to turn America’s most successful search engine into a public utility. As part of its proposed remedies in its antitrust case against Google, the department would force the company to share its technology, data and models with competitors at marginal cost.

This is the same strategy it used against the incumbent telephone companies in the 1990s. It discouraged investment and competition. The strategy would have similarly deleterious effects today, undermining consumer welfare, innovation and U.S.

leadership in artificial intelligence at the worst possible moment. The scope of the requirements is staggering: Google would be required to share its search index, its user data, and the fruits of its research and development with rivals, all without making a real profit. Any company could resell Google’s search results rather than develop its own technology.

This regulatory market manipulation is a sharp departure from the consumer-welfare standard that is meant to guide antitrust policy. History demonstrates how difficult it is to implement sharing requirements in industries with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. When the government tried to do the same thing to the phone companies in the ’90s, disputes over cost allocation proved endless.

Like a single phone call, the cost of a single search query may be close to zero, but the equipment, research-and-development and network costs that allow for it are substantial. The Federal Communications Commission spent years adjudicating disputes over cost allocation, producing complex methodologies that were immediately challenged in court. The Justice Department would face similar problems with its proposed Google