So, OpenAI had a weird week. The hottest company in tech just saw the removal, replacement, and reinstatement of its superstar CEO, Sam Altman in the span of five days. It also saw, as a result of that Altman drama, the removal and replacement of most of its board of directors. In the middle of this, almost every OpenAI employee threatened to quit, the company cycled through two interim CEOs, Microsoft set up a new Altman-led AI arm of its own, and we all faced the very real possibility that the $80 billion company behind ChatGPT would completely implode.

And we still don’t really know why.

The chaos started on November 17, when the OpenAI board announced Altman’s termination, kicking off several days of negotiations to bring him back, as was the desire of the company’s employees and its main investor, Microsoft. On November 22, OpenAI announced that Altman would indeed be returning as CEO, and most of the board that voted to fire him was being replaced.

This is not, suffice to say, how CEO firings traditionally play out. But OpenAI isn’t a traditional company. It became a Silicon Valley success story in a time when the industry was seen as largely stagnant. In the past year, thousands have been laid off at tech companies that have only ever known growth. Then along came generative AI and ChatGPT, new technology that is cool and exciting to everyone from the average consumer to one of the most valuable companies in the world. One of them, Microsoft, eagerly hitched its wagon to OpenAI and to Altman, who became the poster boy of the billion-dollar AI revolution. 

OpenAI, as the leading developer of the technology that could shape how (or if) we live in the future, was shaping up to be one of the most important companies in the world. For a few days there, it looked like we were witnessing the effective end of that company. Now, however, order seems to have been restored.

That still leaves some big questions unanswered. Again, we still don’t know why OpenAI’s previous board made the extreme decision to remove Altman — nor do we know if their concerns with Altman were alleviated before he came back. And now that there’s a new board in place, one that includes a former Meta executive and a former treasury secretary, it’s hard to predict exactly what OpenAI does next.

Why did Sam Altman get fired?

The short answer: It’s still unclear. Altman seems to have no idea what happened, and the board has said very little, publicly, about its reasoning beyond that it didn’t trust Altman anymore. It’s also, reportedly, refused to say much privately. It appears there were fundamental differences between the (now former) board’s vision for AI, which included carrying out that mission of safety and transparency, and Altman’s vision, which, apparently, was not that. 

How did Altman come back when the board was so determined to get rid of him?

Well, that board no longer exists, for one. As part of the deal to bring Altman back, most of its members were replaced, presumably with people Altman wants to be there and who share his vision. Those new members are former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor, who will serve as its chair, and economist Larry Summers. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo will remain on, the only member of the previous board to stick around. As this was described by OpenAI as an ”initial” board, we will almost certainly get a few additions in time. Including, perhaps, Altman, who was on OpenAI’s original board, and someone from Microsoft.

Departing board members are Ilya Sutskever, who co-founded OpenAI and is it chief scientist, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley; and Helen Toner, Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s director of strategy and foundational research grants. Toner, reportedly, had an especially frosty relationship with Altman because she co-authored a research paper that he saw as critical of OpenAI. Toner’s public comment so far is that she’s looking forward to getting some sleep.

More than a few people have noted that, aside from Sutskever (who made his change of heart known and still works at OpenAI), the only board members who were removed happen to be women — and they’ve been replaced with two white men. The optics aren’t great here, but, again, we’ll likely get additional members soon who may well be people who aren’t white men.

Perhaps more importantly, as far as Altman and the investors who pushed for the board to be revamped are concerned, is that the board is now made up of people with tech board and business experience. D’Angelo and Taylor both were chief technology officers at Facebook, for one, and Taylor was the chair of Twitter’s board until Elon Musk took over. As for Summers, he’s currently the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard, where he’s previously served as its president, and has held prominent positions in the Clinton (secretary of the treasury) and Obama (director of the National Economic Council) administrations. He’s also seen as someone who is very tech-business-friendly and would never dream of putting safety before profit.

How did Sam Altman, the boy wonder of AI, become a controversial figure?

Before Altman headed up OpenAI, he was the CEO of the influential startup accelerator Y Combinator, so he was well known in certain Silicon Valley circles. Altman was also a co-founder of OpenAI, and as the company started to be seen as the leader of a new technological revolution, he put himself forward as its youthful, press-friendly ambassador. As CEO, he went on an AI world tour, rubbing elbows with and winning over world leaders and telling various governments, including Congress and the Biden administration, how best to regulate this transformative technology — in ways that were very much advantageous to OpenAI and therefore Altman.

Altman often says that his company’s products could contribute to the end of humanity itself. Not many CEOs (at least, of companies that don’t make weapons) humblebrag about how potentially dangerous their business’s products are. That could be seen as a CEO being refreshingly honest, even if it makes his company look bad. It could also be seen as a CEO saying that his company is one of the most important and powerful things in the world, and you should trust him to lead it because he cares that much about all of us. 

If you see generative AI as an enormously beneficial tool for humanity, you’re probably a fan of Altman. If you’re concerned about how the world will change when generative AI starts to replace human jobs and presumably becomes more and more powerful, you may not like Altman very much.

Simply put, Altman has made himself the face of AI, and people have responded accordingly.

And how did OpenAI get to be such a big deal? 

OpenAI was founded in 2015, but it’s never been your average Silicon Valley startup. For one, it had the backing of many prominent tech people, including Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk, who is also credited as being one of its co-founders. Second, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. Its mission was not to move as quickly as possible to make as much money as possible, but rather to research and develop a technology with enormous transformative potential that therefore needed to be done safely, responsibly, and transparently: AI with the ability to learn and think for itself, also known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. In order to do so, the company would need to develop generative AI, or AI that can learn from massive amounts of data and generate content upon request. 

A few years later, OpenAI needed money. Altman took over as CEO in 2019. Around that time, it established a “capped profit” arm, allowing investors to get up to 100 times a return on what they put into it. The rest of the profit — if there was any — would go back into OpenAI’s nonprofit. The company was still governed by a board of directors charged with carrying out that nonprofit mission, but the board was pretty much the only thing left of OpenAI’s nonprofit origins.

OpenAI released some of its generative AI products into the world in 2022, giving everyone a chance to experiment with them. People were impressed, and OpenAI was seen as the leader in a burgeoning industry. Thanks to $13 billion of investments from Microsoft, OpenAI has been able to develop and market its services, giving Microsoft access to the new technologies along the way. Microsoft pinned a large part of its future on AI, and with its investment in OpenAI, established a partnership with the most prominent and seemingly advanced company in the field. And OpenAI’s valuation grew by leaps and bounds.

Meanwhile, Altman emerged as the leader of the AI movement because he was the head of the leading AI company, a role he has embraced. He has extolled the virtues of AI (and OpenAI) to world leaders. He says regulation is important, lest his company become too powerful (only to balk when regulation actually happens). And along the way, he has become one of the most powerful people in tech, if not beyond. Which is part of why his abrupt termination as CEO of OpenAI was such a shock.

If Altman was otherwise so popular, what was the OpenAI board so upset about? 

Removing Altman could have amounted to a huge, potentially company-destroying deal, so you’d think there’d be a very good reason the OpenAI board decided to do it. It has yet to tell us what that reason is.

The board has the authority to remove its CEO with a majority vote. Altman and OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman were on that board — Brockman was its chair — but clearly not involved in the vote for their own ouster from it. 

The board said in a statement that its decision was the result of a “deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that [Altman] was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” 

So, yeah, that’s a little vague. For what it’s worth, Emmett Shear, who briefly served as OpenAI’s interim CEO during all of this, tweeted that “the board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.”

We do have some reporting that Altman and the board hadn’t gotten along for a while now, much of this due to the release and massive success of ChatGPT. OpenAI suddenly became one of the hottest tech companies and moved quickly to capitalize on that. That’s what a for-profit startup does — not a nonprofit, which, again, OpenAI supposedly was. 

Altman hasn’t said anything publicly about why he was removed, and it’s beyond belief that he had no idea that there were tensions. Brockman, who resigned in solidarity with Altman, said that he and Altman were “shocked and saddened.” Presumably, more will come out in time about the board’s reasoning for firing Altman. According to the New York Times, there will be an “independent investigation” into Altman as part of the former board’s deal to bring him back.

Given OpenAI’s mission to develop safe and responsible AI, there are fears that Altman was driving the development of unsafe and irresponsible AI and that the board felt it had to put a stop to it. But, again, we don’t yet know if those fears are founded.

What happened after Altman got fired? OpenAI got a new CEO and everyone was happy?

During the five days when Altmas was not CEO, OpenAI actually got two interim CEOs and, it seems, almost no one was happy about any of it. 

When the board announced Altman’s departure, it said that chief technology officer Mira Murati would be its interim CEO. In the next few days, many of OpenAI’s employees openly revolted, and the board was reported to be desperately trying to get Altman back, with Microsoft very much pressuring them to do so. But then Shear, who is Twitch’s co-founder and former CEO, announced that he was OpenAI’s CEO. Not Murati, and not Altman.

It didn’t seem like he’d have much to oversee, with most of OpenAI’s employees threatening to quit if Altman and Brockman weren’t reinstated and the current board didn’t leave. Murati was the first signee. Several prominent OpenAI employees also tweeted that “OpenAI is nothing without its people,” which Altman quote-tweeted with a single heart. Sutskever was also a signatory of the letter. He has since tweeted that “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions.” (Which earned him a three-heart quote tweet from Altman — no hard feelings!)

With Altman back at the helm, it appears that most of the order has been restored. Brockman is also back and tweeted a photo of himself with many OpenAI employees, all looking quite happy about everything. 

How did the rest of Silicon Valley respond to the drama? Do people still think Altman should be running OpenAI?

Sam Altman is a very wealthy, very well-connected entrepreneur-turned-investor who was also running the most exciting tech startup in years. So it’s not surprising that once the news of his firing broke, the tech industry’s narrative quickly became one about the OpenAI board’s ineptitude, not any of his shortcomings. 

But there is a world beyond the tech industry, and not everyone in it is behind Altman. You won’t hear many people defending the board out loud since it’s much safer to support Altman. But writer Eric Newcomer, in a post he published November 19, took a stab at it. He noted, for instance, that Altman has had fallouts with partners before — one of whom was Elon Musk — and reported that Altman was asked to leave his perch running Y Combinator.

“Altman had been given a lot of power, the cloak of a nonprofit, and a glowing public profile that exceeds his more mixed private reputation,” Newcomer wrote. “He lost the trust of his board. We should take that seriously.”

What was Microsoft’s response to all this? Did they really offer Altman a job?

Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI, and a big part of its future direction is riding on OpenAI’s success. OpenAI’s complete implosion would be a very bad development for that future.

When it seemed that talks between Altman and OpenAI had broken down, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted that the company was still very confident in OpenAI and its new leadership, but that it was also starting a “new advanced AI research team” headed up by — you guessed it — Sam Altman. He added that Brockman and unnamed “colleagues” were also on board.

But Nadella also made it very clear, in multiple interviews, that he was open to (and would prefer) Altman to return to running OpenAI — and that he wasn’t very happy with its board, which didn’t consult with nor give Microsoft a heads up about its plans, let alone tell its partner and main investor why it made that decision. And Altman tweeted that “satya and my top priority remains to ensure openai continues to thrive.”

With Altman back at OpenAI, it looks like Microsoft’s new AI research team won’t need to go forward. He tweeted that his return to OpenAI was done “w satya’s support.”

What does all this mean for AI safety? 

That kind of depends on what OpenAI had in the works and Altman’s plans for it, doesn’t it? Maybe Altman and OpenAI figured out the artificial general intelligence puzzle and the board thought it was too powerful to release so they canned him. Maybe it had nothing to do with OpenAI’s tech at all and more to do with the unresolvable conflict between a nonprofit’s mission and an executive’s quest to build the most valuable company in the world — a conflict that got worse and worse as OpenAI and Altman got bigger and bigger. And which, in the end, Altman won.

If nothing else, this whole debacle serves as a reminder that the safety of products shouldn’t be left to the businesses that put them out into the world, which are generally only interested in safety when it makes them money or stops them from losing it. Housing that mission within a safety-focused nonprofit will only work as long as the nonprofit doesn’t stop the company from making money. And remember, OpenAI isn’t the only company working on this technology. Plenty of others that are very much not nonprofits, like Google and Meta, have their own generative AI models.

Governments around the world are trying to figure out how best to regulate AI. How safe this technology is will largely rely on if and how they do it. It won’t and shouldn’t depend on one man (read: Altman) who says he has the world’s best interests at heart and that we should trust him.

Update, November 22, 12:30 pm ET: This story was originally published on November 20 and has been updated to include news of Altman’s reinstatement and more details about his ouster and return.

The Google search antitrust trial is expected to wrap up by Thanksgiving. And while we’ll have to wait until next year for a verdict, there are a few things we learned over the last two months of the first big test of the limits of Big Tech’s power.

The Department of Justice is accusing Google of using its monopoly over internet search to freeze out its competitors — real or potential. Instead of innovating and putting out a superior product that users prefer, as Google insists it does, the government says the company is resting on its laurels and paying off manufacturers, carriers, and browser developers to make Google the default search engine across countless devices and operating systems. That’s why, when you search for something on Safari or Firefox, ask Siri a question, or type something into the search widget that came pre-installed on your Samsung Galaxy’s home screen, Google is powering that search. And although you can always change it to a different search engine, the DOJ maintains that most people don’t know they can or don’t know how, creating an exclusionary barrier to entry.

Part of the problem is that Google pays billions of dollars every year for default placement, a price almost none of its competitors — if it really even has any — can afford. That helps Google make many more billions of dollars off the ads on those search results. Having as many people using Google Search as much as possible is what makes the company’s search engine so attractive to advertisers, and the majority of Google’s revenue comes from those search ads. The incredible amount of data Google collects from those trillions of searches also helps it monetize some of its other services and gives it a major competitive edge over other search providers. Knowing what everyone everywhere wants to know all the time has made Google one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Over the course of the trial, we’ve learned a little bit more about the lengths Google has gone to to stay on top and boost revenue, and how hard it is for other search engines to gain a foothold. We don’t know as much as we could because Google has also gone to great lengths to keep as much information as possible away from the public.

Is Google using its dominant search market position to illegally freeze out competition, giving users a worsening search experience and advertisers less bang for more bucks because there’s no other game in town? Or is Google simply offering the best experience possible, without the added hassle of having to wade through a pesky choice screen the first time users open a search app? 

We’ll find out what a judge thinks in a few months. In the meantime, here’s what we learned in the landmark trial, the result of which may change your internet experience.

1. Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 to own search defaults — and made a whole lot more from search ads

Midway through the trial, Judge Amit Mehta unredacted part of a slide that showed how much Google pays out on those default search agreements. And it’s a lot! In 2021, the most recent year available, Google gave $26.3 billion to companies like Apple, Verizon, Samsung, and Mozilla. Google’s search ad revenue that year, which is also on the slide, was $146.4 billion. (In 2014, the first year these numbers are available, Google paid $7.1 billion and made $46.8 billion.) Not a bad return on the company’s investment. It’s also a high bar that no competitor, except maybe Microsoft, could hope to reach — more on that later.

2. Google’s secretive deal with Apple gets a little less secret

Google’s revenue-sharing deal with Apple was a major part of the trial because Apple is believed to get the bulk of what Google pays out in those agreements. Having a default search placement on Apple devices, which make up roughly half of the smartphone market in the US, is extremely important to Google. We’ve known for years that Google pays Apple for that default placement — this also stops Apple from developing its own search engine — but that’s about it. While Google tried to keep virtually everything about the deal away from the public, we still got a few new details.

In an apparent slip-up, Google’s own witness in the waning days of the trial told us how much of Google’s ad revenue Apple gets: 36 percent for searches done on its Safari browser. The monetary value of that 36 percent is still a mystery. Judge Mehta did not disclose how big Apple’s slice of the $26.3 billion pie is, allowing the DOJ only to say it’s “more than $10 billion.” But the New York Times, citing internal Google sources, put it at $18 billion. 

3. Apple thought about buying Bing

We didn’t just find out some of Google’s secrets; a few things about Apple came out, too. Apple’s senior vice president John Giannandrea testified that his company talked to Microsoft about buying Bing in 2018. Apple ultimately decided against it, but not before using the possibility as leverage in its search default negotiations with Google, something Microsoft is still pretty sore about. Apple executive Eddy Cue testified that the company chooses Google to be the default search because it believes Google is the best for its users. But speaking of Bing …

4. Microsoft was desperate to make Bing happen  

Multiple Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, testified that Microsoft really, really wanted to make Bing the default search on Apple devices, to the point where it was willing to lose billions of dollars a year for the privilege. Samsung and Verizon, the trial also revealed, essentially refused to even negotiate with Microsoft over changing their search defaults to Bing. Perhaps they were thinking of Mozilla’s experience switching from Google to Yahoo. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker testified that Yahoo offered more money and fewer ads, so Mozilla’s Firefox browser switched the default from Google to Yahoo in 2014. Mozilla switched back to Google a few years later, which Baker attributed to Google’s search being better for its users, echoing the point that Google emphasized in its defense.

5. Google wasn’t always a big fan of search defaults

When Microsoft was the dominant player in web browsers, Google didn’t think search engine defaults were so great, and said as much in newly revealed documents. In 2005, former Google lawyer David Drummond warned Microsoft, at that point just a few years removed from its own antitrust woes, that making Microsoft’s search engine the default on its (then market-leading) Internet Explorer browser would be a bad look to antitrust regulators, and Google might sue Microsoft over it.

6. How Google’s money printer goes brrr (at someone else’s expense)

We got a few glimpses of how Google milks or manipulates its search engine for additional revenue. In March 2019, the company was trying to figure out what to do about the possibility that it wouldn’t meet its search revenue targets due to a “softness” in search queries. An email from then-head of search, Ben Gomes, expressed concern over how his division was “getting too involved with ads” and that he was “deeply deeply uncomfortable” over the prospect of increasing the number of search queries (and therefore the number of ads served) by degrading the user experience. There’s no evidence Google actually did or asked for this, and Gomes testified that he was discussing things the company would never actually do. Gomes stepped down as head of search in 2020. He was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, who was previously the head of Google’s ad business. 

Perhaps more damning was an admission from Jerry Dischler, Google’s current head of ads, that the company has tweaked search ad auctions in ways that may increase prices to advertisers by 5 or even 10 percent so that Google could meet its revenue goals. Dischler said Google didn’t tell advertisers about the changes. They know now!

“I think that that’s a critical fact,” Lee Hepner, legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust advocacy group, told Vox. “Not just because it’s kind of surprising that they’re doing this without advertisers’ knowledge, but also because it’s indicative of Google’s monopoly power in the search ad market if they are able to raise prices on advertisers without losing market share.” 

Google told Vox that the company “invest[s] significantly in ads quality to continuously improve on our ability to show ads that are highly relevant to people, and helpful to what they’re searching for.” That includes, the company said, “implementing quality thresholds for advertisers, which help eliminate irrelevant ads and have been a widely known part of the auction for more than a decade.” 

7. There’s a lot that Google made sure we don’t know

While the trial revealed more of the company’s inner workings than it might have liked, Google was able to keep a lot of things secret. A good amount of testimony has occurred behind closed doors, and many documents were redacted whole or in part. An attempt to give the public remote access to the trial through an audio feed was denied.

There’s also a lot that we’ll never see because it doesn’t exist or is legally protected. Google executives sometimes turned their chat histories off to avoid leaving a paper trail, or copied attorneys on emails they didn’t need to be on to keep them protected under attorney-client privilege. They also made sure not to use certain words that would get the attention of antitrust regulators. Google said that it has “produced over four million documents, including thousands of chats” over the course of this case.

“You get the impression that Google’s strategy for avoiding antitrust scrutiny is not to avoid engaging in antitrust violations, but to avoid talking about engaging in those antitrust violations,” Hepner said.

If one Google antitrust trial isn’t enough for you, you’re in luck: Google’s currently fighting another antitrust lawsuit in California over its Play store, and the trial over the DOJ’s other antitrust lawsuit against Google, over its digital advertising business, should begin in March of next year.

Judge Mehta’s verdict should come out early next year. If he finds in favor of the DOJ, we’ll get the next phase of the trial, where the judge decides what Google’s punishment should be. That could be anything from forbidding Google to making default search agreements to ordering the break-up of the company. Whatever happens, the verdict surely won’t be the last word in the case. No matter who wins or loses, Google’s big antitrust case will likely be appealed, possibly up to the Supreme Court.

Update, November 16, 10:15 am: This article was published on November 16 and has been updated to include comments from Google about ad pricing and documents.

The first big trial of the modern Big Tech antitrust movement is here: On September 12, the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google’s search engine monopoly began. What’s at stake? Oh, nothing much — just the future of the internet. Or maybe the future of antitrust law in the US. Maybe both.

This is the first antitrust trial that goes after a Big Tech company’s business practices since the DOJ took on Microsoft in the late ’90s, and it’s the first in a set of antitrust lawsuits against dominant tech platforms from federal and state antitrust enforcers that will play out in the next few months. Those include the DOJ and state attorneys general’s lawsuits against Google over its ad tech business, the FTC’s case against Meta over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon over its marketplace platform. Apple might even catch a lawsuit, too. The outcomes of these cases, starting with this one, will tell us if our antitrust laws, written decades before the internet existed and tried before an increasingly business-friendly justice system, can be applied to dominant digital platforms’ business practices now. 

“If the DOJ loses, it becomes a very serious question of what’s it going to take,” Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, an open internet advocacy group, said. “Other than an act of Congress, is there any way that a court is going to apply the antitrust laws to these new business models and new technologies?”

That is to say, this case may change how much power those platforms have over us and how they’re allowed to wield it. And it all boils down to a simple question: Which search engine do you use, and why?

The first part of this isn’t in dispute. If you’re like 90 percent of Americans, it’s Google, which has been synonymous with internet search for decades. The “why” is where the fight is. Google says it’s because it’s the best search engine out there. The DOJ and attorneys general from almost every state and territory in the country say it’s because Google pays a host of companies — everyone from Apple to Verizon — billions of dollars a year to make its search the default on the vast majority of devices and browsers. While Google has refused to give the exact amount, it was revealed during the trial that it paid $26.3 billion in 2021 alone, and made $146.4 billion in revenue for search ads in that period. The majority of that money is believed to go to Apple.

Most of us probably take search engines for granted at this point, but they’re still a hugely important part of how the internet works. The proof is Google, which in just 25 years has grown into a $1.7 trillion company that owns major swaths of what we do online. It was all built on that search engine, which remains Google’s biggest revenue generator even now. Search ads were nearly 60 percent of the company’s revenue in 2022, to the tune of $162.45 billion. And that doesn’t count all the other ways Google can and does monetize its exclusive knowledge of what most of the world wants to know all the time.

Ironically enough, it was another tech company’s antitrust woes that helped Google emerge in the first place: Microsoft.

Remember Internet Explorer? The DOJ sure does.

A few decades ago, your internet experience almost certainly began with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as was the case for up to 95 percent of internet users when the browser was at its early 2000s peak. But that market share didn’t happen because Internet Explorer was better, the DOJ contended in its 1998 antitrust lawsuit against the company. It was because Microsoft leveraged its dominance over computer operating systems to force its browser onto users. 

Internet Explorer was bundled with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and Microsoft ensured it was just about impossible to remove. Installing an alternate browser was technically possible but difficult, so most people didn’t bother. This killed off most of Internet Explorer’s competitors and gave Microsoft a monopoly over internet browsers that was similar to the one it enjoyed over computer operating systems. And that, the DOJ said, was an abuse of Microsoft’s monopoly power.

The US District Court for the District of Columbia agreed and ordered Microsoft to be broken up into two companies. But a higher court overturned part of that ruling, and the DOJ subsequently settled with Microsoft. The company got to stay in one piece, but it paid a price. While Microsoft was tied up in court, paying billions in fines, afraid to make any major moves that could incur more government wrath and no longer allowed to gatekeep the internet through its browser, new companies like Google emerged.

Now, the DOJ says, the cycle is repeating. But Google is the one that is using its dominance to freeze out competitors, and consumers are being denied the kind of innovation that put Google on the map in the first place. 

“If the government’s allegations are to be believed, Google is doing exactly what Microsoft did in many respects,” said Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer who was instrumental in convincing the DOJ to bring the case against Microsoft back then and tried to get the FTC to take on Google 10 years ago. “The major arguments — I’ve seen them all before — they were made by Microsoft, and they failed.”

The DOJ’s lawsuit was filed in October 2020, at the very end of Trump’s presidency and when anti-Big Tech sentiment was high and bipartisan. It came just a few weeks after the House’s long investigation into Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta’s business practices, which led to a set of bipartisan, bicameral antitrust bills meant to address the unique ways digital platforms operate and maintain their dominance. Eleven states joined that suit; three more signed on a few months later. In December 2020, 35 states, the territories of Puerto Rico and Guam, and Washington, DC, filed their own lawsuit against Google over its search practices. Those two cases have been combined for this trial.

Microsoft has a place in this lawsuit, too, by the way: This time, it’s as a witness for the government. CEO Satya Nadella testified on October 2 that Google’s dominance has made it impossible for his company’s search engine, Bing, to truly compete — even as Microsoft has invested about $100 billion into its search engine to try. He said his company has tried to negotiate with Apple for years to break up its “oligopolistic” relationship with Google, offering the iPhone maker tens of billions of dollars to switch the search default from Google to Bing.

“Defaults are the only thing that matter,” Nadella said.

Apple, obviously, didn’t bite. Google’s argument is that Bing just isn’t as good as Google is. Even Windows users who have Microsoft’s Edge browser with its Bing default pre-installed prefer Google to Bing (though Bing’s market share is bigger on Windows PCs than it is elsewhere), and, as Nadella admitted, the most queried word on Bing is “Google.” Apple, Google says, is choosing the search engine it thinks is best for its customers — not the one that happens to pay it the most.

This isn’t to be confused with all the other antitrust lawsuits the government has filed against Google that address other parts of its business. One of those, about Google’s app store, was recently settled. Two others about Google’s ad tech business are winding their way through the courts. Here, we’re just looking at Google’s search arm, which is the foundation of the company but far from the only thing it does.

There are also a few things you won’t see in this case that used to be there. A few weeks ago, Judge Mehta threw out several of the plaintiffs’ claims. The states’ argument that Google harmed competitors like Yelp and Expedia by designing its search results to prominently feature its own services over theirs was tossed. The DOJ’s claims that Google’s agreements with manufacturers to give its services default placement on Androids and Internet of Things devices were exclusionary were also dismissed.

So we’re left with two claims. One is from the states’ case about Google’s search engine marketing tool, and it accuses the company of making certain features available to its search engine and not Microsoft’s Bing in order to give it an unfair advantage. But the core of this case is the second claim about Google’s default search agreements. 

How Google’s default search agreements hurt you — or help

With so much of its revenue riding on the popularity and scale of its search product, Google is willing to spend a lot of money to ensure that it’s the default search in as many places as possible. The company shells out billions of dollars every year to browser developers, device manufacturers, and phone carriers for Google to be the default search engine almost everywhere. The exact amounts of those default search agreements have been redacted for this trial, but estimates put it at as much as $20 billion a year to Apple alone.  

This paid placement, the DOJ says, has helped Google maintain its dominance and made it impossible for just about anyone else to compete. Very few companies have billions of dollars to throw around. Or, as the DOJ said, it’s “creating a continuous and self-reinforcing cycle of monopolization.”

And while it’s possible for users to switch to a different search engine, very few of them actually do. The DOJ is expected to say that’s because Google has locked up the best distribution channels. Using a competitor requires knowing that it’s even possible to do it in the first place as well as how to make the switch. There are also countless studies that will tell you how difficult it is to overcome consumer inertia. The vast majority of people just go with whatever’s there, which is why Google is paying to be there. Microsoft’s defense that people could install alternate browsers if they so chose didn’t work 25 years ago. The DOJ doesn’t think it should work now.

All this has hurt competitors, who can’t get a foothold in the market, according to the DOJ. It has impacted advertisers, who have to pay what Google is charging for those search ads because there’s no other game in town, and consumers, who don’t have much choice in search engines.

The lack of choice is also, the suit says, stifling innovation. There’s no pressure on Google to improve its product because there aren’t any companies trying to develop their own, possibly better, ones. The DOJ will likely argue that the quality of Google’s product has gone down as its dominance became more entrenched. One example could be all of those knowledge panels Google sticks on top of search results that direct users to other Google products, not to mention the presence of more and more search ads. The states’ case that this harmed third parties like Yelp was thrown out, but the DOJ could still say that it harms consumers who have to do more work to get to the search results they came to Google for in the first place.

There are other search engines, but they’ve struggled to gain market share. The aforementioned Bing currently has just 6.4 percent of the US market (Yahoo!, which uses Bing, is another 2.4 percent). There’s also DuckDuckGo, which has been trying to compete with Google as a privacy-preserving alternative. But it only has a fraction of the market, and it blames Google’s default search agreements for that.

“Even though DuckDuckGo provides something extremely valuable that people want and Google won’t provide — real privacy — Google makes it unduly difficult to use DuckDuckGo by default. We’re glad this issue is finally going to have its day in court,” Kamyl Bazbaz, spokesperson for DuckDuckGo, said in a statement. 

DuckDuckGo, obviously, is an existing product. This case is also very much about the search engines that don’t exist and never will, the ones that you, the consumer, will never get to use. The DOJ will likely argue that’s because Google intentionally made the search engine barrier to entry too high. The co-founder of now-defunct search engine Neeva recently testified that his company, which had a subscription model rather than ad-based, couldn’t get the traction it needed in the face of Google’s monopoly.

For its part, Google maintains that it’s the most popular search engine because it’s the best one out there, giving its users the most meaningful and relevant results. The company says that the DOJ’s case is aimed at helping competitors — not consumers.

Google says the companies that choose its search to be the default on their products do so because it’s better, not because Google is paying them. And consumers use Google because it’s better, not because it happens to be there when they turn their new phones on or fire up their new computer’s browser for the first time.

“People don’t use Google because they have to — they use it because they want to,” Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in a blog post. “Making it easier for people to get the products they want benefits consumers and is supported by American antitrust law.”

But why, you might ask, is Google paying anyone at all if it’s so great? Well, the company has long maintained that this is equivalent to a brand paying a grocery store for prime shelf space, something that is perfectly legal and happens all the time. (People who disagree with this will point out that occupying the only search engine slot on the vast majority of web browsers and devices is not quite the same thing as sitting on a shelf in a grocery store.) Google thinks it’s improving customer access to what it believes is the best product. And that, Google says, is good for consumers.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stand on October 30 to say as much. He acknowledged that the default agreements are valuable to Google, but framed them as a promotional tool for the company.

But the DOJ referenced a Google executive’s notes from a 2018 meeting between Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook, which described them as wanting to “work as if we are one company.” Pichai said he didn’t remember saying that and doesn’t agree with it either, stressing that Apple is a competitor, not a partner. The government has also maintained that part of the reason why Google paid off Apple was to prevent the company from developing its own search engine. Pichai admitted that Google has, at times, had concerns that Apple could become a search competitor, but maintained that wasn’t the reason why it made those deals with the company.

Google also says it’s easy to switch to a different search engine — much easier, in fact, than it was to install a new browser back in the Microsoft lawsuit days. Apps can be downloaded in seconds, and it takes just a few clicks to change your search engine settings, as long as you know it’s possible and how to do it.

“While default settings matter (that’s why we bid for them), they’re easy to change. People can and do switch,” Walker said.

Google also says it’s continuously improving and innovating. Any perceived lack of competition (and the company says it has plenty of competition) hasn’t caused it to rest on its laurels.

“We invest billions of dollars in R&D and make thousands of quality improvements to Search every year to ensure we’re delivering the most helpful results,” Walker said.

Finally, Google has maintained that the market is more than just general search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo, because general search engines aren’t the only way people look for things on the internet. They may also go directly to Reddit or Amazon, for example. So it has more competitors than the DOJ claims as well as a smaller market share. That’s probably not going to fly with the judge, but Google will give it a try anyway.

The future of the internet, as determined by a business-friendly justice system

As Reback says, we saw many of these concepts litigated with the Microsoft case nearly three decades ago. So we should have case law that says some of the same or very similar practices Google is engaged in are illegal, right? Not necessarily. 

Google has a few things going for it here. For one, it’s been more careful about how it phrases and frames things in internal documents than Microsoft was (assuming those internal documents exist — the DOJ has accused Google of withholding or destroying some of them). For another, the courts that will ultimately decide how to apply the law are different, too. 

“Since Microsoft, there’s been a couple of Supreme Court decisions that are, by their attitude and their approach, tolerant of dominant firm behavior,” William Kovacic, who served as the chair of the FTC under George W. Bush, said. “Their attitude toward plaintiffs is not nearly so generous as the Court of Appeals was in the Microsoft case.”

No matter what the judge decides, it will be a while before we know the final outcome. The trial is expected to last about nine weeks, and Judge Mehta’s ruling won’t come out until next year. We’re sure to have a long appeals process after that. But whatever the outcome is, it may be hugely consequential, especially when viewed in combination with the other digital platform antitrust cases we have now (or likely will have soon) and the larger antitrust reform movement.

If Google loses, it faces the possibility of being broken up into smaller companies (an extreme, but not unheard of, measure that the DOJ is asking for) or forbidden from offering those search agreements. We could be looking at a much different Google, or we’ll get to see which search engine users pick when Google is not the default.

If the DOJ loses, there are a few ways to look at it. One is that this is proof that Google isn’t doing anything wrong and should be allowed to continue to operate as it always has, without being unfairly targeted by the government with its anti-Big Tech agenda.

But if you believe that Google and its Big Tech brethren’s dominance and power is a problem that needs to be solved, a DOJ loss would show that our antitrust laws and the courts that are charged with interpreting them aren’t equipped to deal with the realities of this digital economy and how its major players operate within it.

“If the government gets the door slammed on its face … if they try and they lose, then they can turn to Congress and say, ‘Well, our antitrust system is so cramped and limited that we can’t do the job. You’ve got to fix it,’” Kovacic said.

That could be what motivates Congress to pass antitrust laws that do account for dominant digital platforms. An internet that’s essentially controlled by a handful of companies may well open back up again — assuming it isn’t already too late.

Update, October 30, 5 pm ET: This story was originally published on September 9 and has been updated to include testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Neeva’s co-founder, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google’s default payments in 2021 have also been added.

Editor’s note, October 13, 11:10 am ET: After finally winning approval from British regulators, Microsoft has closed its purchase of Activision Blizzard. It’s unclear how this will affect Xbox owners and other gamers, but the completion of the deal represents a major blow to the FTC’s effort to rein in Big Tech. The original story, which was last updated on July 17, is below:

Microsoft’s $69 billion merger with Activision Blizzard seems all but inevitable now: Sony is finally playing along. Microsoft’s main rival and opposition to the acquisition just signed a deal to keep Activision’s Call of Duty on its PlayStation consoles pending the merger’s completion. The deal is a significant sign that Sony believes the acquisition will happen.

The deal, which Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer announced on Twitter on Sunday, will require Microsoft to make Call of Duty titles available for PlayStation for the next 10 years, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Vox. Sony’s stated fears that Microsoft would pull Call of Duty from PlayStation platforms were one of the Federal Trade Commission’s major arguments in its lawsuit to block the merger.

But the FTC’s gambit suffered a major blow last week when a federal judge denied its request for a preliminary injunction to stop the merger before the trial is scheduled to begin in August. The FTC’s appeal of the decision was denied a few days later. That gives the companies the green light to complete their merger, although it could be undone should the FTC win its lawsuit. At this point, however, it’s exceedingly unlikely that the FTC will continue its case at all; it usually drops lawsuits like this when it loses the preliminary injunction to block them.

“We’re grateful to the court in San Francisco for this quick and thorough decision and hope other jurisdictions will continue working towards a timely resolution,” Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, said in a statement about the initial decision to deny the preliminary injunction.

“We are disappointed in this outcome given the clear threat this merger poses to open competition in cloud gaming, subscription services, and consoles,” FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar told Vox at the time of the initial decision.

The FTC sued Microsoft and Activision Blizzard last December to stop their planned $69 billion merger, saying the deal would unfairly harm competition in a gaming market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Microsoft will become the third-largest gaming company in the world, behind Tencent and Sony, if the deal goes through. But the agency didn’t have the authority to stop the acquisition from happening in the meantime, hence the injunction request. Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said she didn’t think the FTC would win its case and so wouldn’t stop the companies from merging.

“The FTC has not shown it is likely to succeed on its assertion the combined firm will probably pull Call of Duty from Sony PlayStation, or that its ownership of Activision content will substantially lessen competition in the video game library subscription and cloud gaming markets,” the judge wrote.

It’s a big setback for an agency that has, under chair Lina Khan, intensely scrutinized mergers and acquisitions that will make big companies even bigger, giving them a larger share of a market with fewer competitors in it. The court losses show the uphill battle the agency faces going up against massive companies in a country whose courts typically favor businesses.

Big Tech isn’t the only industry the FTC has focused on, but its size and power — Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are in the top 10 largest companies in the world by market cap as of this writing — makes it an obvious target, one Khan focused on in her pre-FTC work. Under her, the agency continued its lawsuit against Meta that seeks to unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, recently sued Amazon over how difficult the company allegedly makes it to cancel Prime, and settled with Google over a deceptive advertising case. It has yet to win any major victories here, but such cases may take years, if not decades, to resolve. The FTC hasn’t challenged some Big Tech mergers, like Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, and its already lost a few other battles, like its case against Meta’s acquisition of VR game company Within. When the FTC lost a similar bid to get an injunction to prevent that merger, it dropped the case. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if it did the same now.

The weeklong hearing over the preliminary injunction touched on several parts of Microsoft’s business, but the big argument appeared to center on the Call of Duty franchise and if Microsoft would continue to make it available for rival Sony’s PlayStation should it be allowed to acquire Activision. Corley said she believed the evidence showed that more consumers would get access to Call of Duty and other Activision games, rather than fewer. Microsoft has a deal to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo Switch consoles for at least 10 years if the merger closes, for example.

Should the FTC drop the case, Microsoft still has one boss left in its merger battle: the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority, which blocked it over concerns that it would harm the nascent cloud gaming market. But there are signs that it may have found a way to get the UK’s approval after all: the authority and Microsoft jointly asked to delay their hearing before the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which is hearing that request today. This suggests that the CMA might be amenable to approving the merger if Microsoft makes certain concessions. The European Union has already approved the merger.

Update, July 17, 12 pm ET: This story, originally published on July 11, has been updated to include comment from Microsoft and the FTC, the FTC losing its appeal, Sony’s Call of Duty deal, and the hearing before the Competition Appeal Tribunal.