Ben Thompson's take: Google's strategy of sharing monopoly profits made its antitrust remedy too costly to undo

Summary

Ben Thompson argues that Google has won the antitrust war despite losing some battles because the company has made itself too profitable to untangle.

Judge Mehta's remedy blocks Google from entering exclusive distribution deals—the core illegal behavior. Google can no longer condition access to the Play Store or Chrome on defaulting to Google Search, and it cannot prevent partners like Apple or Samsung from distributing rival search engines or AI products alongside Google's.

The judge stopped short of the remedy Thompson had previously recommended: a blanket ban on Google paying for search placement. That matters enormously.

How Google captured the market

Google's strategy was to share monopoly profits instead of hoarding them. The company pays Apple roughly $20 billion per year for search default placement on iPhone. Mozilla gets roughly 80% of its revenue from Google. Device makers commoditized by Android capture scraps of Google's ad revenue through these deals.

These payments, Judge Mehta acknowledged in his opinion, "shaped the market for general search services in Google's favor" and "provide an incredibly strong incentive for the ecosystem to not do anything." They freeze the market in place. Apple could build or partner with a rival search engine. It has the technical capability and capital. It chooses not to because $20 billion a year is easier than competing.

The remedy's contradiction

Judge Mehta declined to ban payments because doing so would harm recipients of those payments—specifically Apple and Mozilla—and downstream effects like fewer browser innovations, less mobile phone innovation, and higher prices for consumers.

This logic contains an implicit admission: if Google is permitted to keep paying, Google will keep dominating search. The judge is saying the remedy might work only if Google stops paying, but we cannot stop Google from paying because that would hurt the beneficiaries of Google's bribes.

Thompson's original argument was direct: monopolies do not get to extend their advantage through contracts. "The problem with aggregators is that they have the temptation to be too nice. It has been very profitable to be Google's friend. I think consumers and Google are better off if the company has a few more enemies."

If payments were banned, Apple becomes a competitor. It partners with or builds a rival search engine. Ad prices potentially fall. Consumer surplus rises. Instead, the judge prioritized the harm to Apple and Mozilla over the wider competitive restoration the remedy was meant to achieve.

What comes next

Judge Mehta included language suggesting he might revisit a payment ban "if competition is not substantially restored through the remedies the court does impose." The data-sharing requirements and syndication provisions are real but limited. Competitors get a one-time snapshot of Google's search index, not the full index or ranking algorithm. User click and query data appears twice at minimum. Syndication is capped at 40% of an alternative search engine's annual queries.

The remedy reads as a catch-up mechanism rather than a structural fix. Everyone gets some of Google's historical data. Then the race restarts, but the payments that made the race uncompetitive remain in place.

Thompson's framing is sharp: Google's strategy of generosity—turning potential enemies into dependent friends—made the company too embedded in the ecosystem to dismantle without pain. The antitrust case was supposed to undo that. Instead, the remedy is structured around preserving it.