Judge approves oversight committee for remedies to Google’s internet search monopoly

WASHINGTON (CN) — A federal judge on Wednesday approved a set of three individuals to an oversight committee set to administer and oversee the implementation of a remedial plan meant to address Google’s monopoly over internet search.

The three-member Technical Committee will be responsible for ensuring Google shares its search index and user data with rival search engine companies and potential competitors entering the search market while screening such recipients to prevent data leaks.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee, granted the Justice Department’s unopposed joint motion to appoint three members to the committee: Tammy Savage, Gerry Campbell and Professor John Abowd. The Justice Department, a coalition of states led by Colorado and Google each selected one member of the committee.

The Justice Department recommended Savage serve as a member and the chair of the committee.

Savage is the CEO and co-founder of Groopit, an artificial intelligence company that uses AI to collect data and generative AI to analyze it. She previously cofounded an application development platform company, Knack, and held several managerial roles throughout Microsoft related to research, engineering and technical integration.

“Across her career, she has also worked extensively on data privacy and security issues, including managing compliance with industry data security standards and working with privacy experts in her roles at Microsoft and Groopit,” the Justice Department said in the motion.

Campbell, the plaintiff states’ selection, is described as a technology executive, entrepreneur and author with a career spanning the formative decades of the commercial internet and was senior vice president and group general manager at AOL from 2001–2006. There, he led the company’s search and content strategy and was co-inventor of 20 patented technologies related to search algorithms and experiences, including work that pioneered search advertising.

Campbell also worked as the president of search and content technologies at Reuters and as chief technology officer and senior vice president at Beachbody. He most recently served as a strategic advisor for technology acceleration at FiscalNote and as a strategist at PhaseFour.ai.

Google’s selection, Cornell University Professor of Economics, Statistics and Data Science John Abowd, has focused research on the publication of information from sensitive datasets in a privacy-protected manner. Abowd worked with the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 until retiring in 2023, where he served as its associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist from 2016 to 2022.

The Technical Committee will be responsible for screening so-called “Qualified Competitors” before they are able to gain access to Google’s significant data trove, a process the tech giant has expressed considerable concern over.

Wednesday’s order comes as Google is seeking a partial stay of certain provisions of Mehta’s final judgment pending its appeal of his overarching liability and remedies rulings — which found Google operated an illegal monopoly and determined what remedies were necessary — that it has long promised.

Specifically, Google asked Mehta in a Jan. 16 filing to freeze its obligations to disclose its search index and user data to qualified competitors, as well as requirements the company enter a search syndication license and search text ads syndication agreement with those competitors.

“Absent a stay, the data-disclosure provisions would irreparably harm Google because competitors will gain access to vast amounts of Google’s proprietary information,” Google said. “‘Disclosure followed by appeal … is obviously not adequate’ because then ‘the cat is out of the bag’ and Google’s confidential data can never ‘be made secret again if the judgment … is ultimately reversed.’ Google would effectively be deprived of its right to appeal these remedies if it were required to turn over the data sets before its appeal is resolved.”

Google has yet to appeal Mehta’s decisions to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which would ultimately be able to significantly narrow Mehta’s remedies or even his initial liability ruling.

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