Google’s dominance in search has made it the subject of antitrust investigations and competition regulation around the world. The latest of these was the announcement in January 2025 that the United Kingdom (UK) Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) was launching an investigation under the UK’s new digital markets competition regime. The investigation will determine whether Google has “Strategic Market Status” (SMS) in search services and how this impacts consumers and businesses, including advertisers, publishers, and competing search engines. In public comments recently filed with the CMA, KGI has underscored the importance of being familiar with previous enforcement efforts around the world and prioritizing certain key aspects of competition.
The CMA’s call for evidence on the market for general search services is part of a broader effort to promote competition in the UK’s digital markets. In 2024, the UK adopted the Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumers Act, which handed the CMA new powers to investigate and address concentration in these crucial markets. Specifically, the CMA can designate technology companies that dominate important digital markets as having SMS and mandate tailored conduct requirements to promote competition. The CMA has recently begun this process for Google by assessing its position in online search, which may lead to bespoke remedies being imposed on the company.
This investigation comes as Google possesses durable monopoly power in online search, with over 90% market share in the UK and many other jurisdictions for well over a decade. In recent years, Google’s business practices have attracted intense scrutiny, particularly its exclusive default agreements with web browsers, mobile phone manufacturers, and various other parties through which it pays tens of billions of dollars each year in exchange for giving its search engine default status on their services.
As global regulators continue to scrutinize Google’s search dominance—including ongoing enforcement actions in the United States, European Union, and Australia—the CMA’s approach could establish important precedents.
KGI’s response to this inquiry focuses on learning from other jurisdictions, scrutinizing Google’s exclusive default agreements with other companies, and studying the role of data and quality in market competition. In October 2024, KGI convened a workshop on crafting effective search competition remedies with leading researchers, advocates, and industry players, culminating in a workshop report that synthesized insights from the expert discussion and gave recommendations to public authorities working on this important issue.
KGI’s comments contemplate many aspects of effective search competition remedies and feature three key insights:
- The CMA should take heed of lessons learned from search competition remedies previously imposed in jurisdictions like the European Union, Russia, and Turkey. Their experience shows that dominant technology companies will seek to delay implementation; that oversight and enforcement can be extraordinarily difficult; and that designated firms cannot be trusted to co-design remedies.
- The CMA should restrict Google’s exclusive default agreements and ensure such restrictions are durable by extending their coverage to all interfaces where search engines are regularly accessed (including generative AI interfaces) and prohibiting Google from using its own products to replicate the default status of its search engine. If these remedies fail, the CMA should consider ordering the divestiture of Google services might use in this conduct (such as the web browser Chrome and mobile operating system Android) and impose line of business restrictions on Google for a fixed period.
- Finally, the CMA should further research the role of access to data in user perceptions of search engine quality and, should data sharing be seriously considered as a remedy, study methods for distinguishing between genuine and pretextual privacy concerns. Early empirical research supports the argument that data access can be helpful for smaller search engines, but the extent to which this is the case is uncertain, and identifying privacy pretexts that aim to impede antitrust remedies has long been a challenging task for public authorities.
Search competition remedies have the potential to reshape a market that intermediates millions of people’s access to information, raising the stakes and urgency to ensure their effectiveness. The CMA is expected to reach a decision by October 2025. Whatever approach the UK regulator takes will likely influence similar investigations worldwide and could help shape the future competitive landscape of online search services.
