Critics and competitors argue that Google's massive web index, far surpassing its rivals in size, should be the focus of antitrust scrutiny
As regulators seek ways to curb the company's power, there is more focus on the vast index — hundreds of billion of web pages — behind its search engine. Tweets: @nkulw , @techwontsaveus , @dmccabe , @nytimesbusiness , @techwontsaveus , and @ryanlcooper Tweets: Noah Kulwin / @nkulw : really love what @zackmaril and the knuckleheads are doing. identifying a specific, actionable harm of Google's that is the keystone of its power https://www.nytimes.com/... @techwontsaveus : Google's index of the web is “largely an unchecked source of power for its monopoly,” says Zack Maril. Fascinating piece about how the privilege given to Google's web crawlers provides a structural advantage that no competitor can overcome. https://www.nytimes.com/... David McCabe / @dmccabe : This is a great @daiwaka look at an under-appreciated aspect of Google's power. https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimesbusiness : Since having their pages crawled costs money, websites have an incentive to let it be done only by search engines like Google that direct enough traffic to them - a business the rest of the internet never caught up with, @daiwaka writes. https://www.nytimes.com/... @techwontsaveus : “In Europe, a group called the Open Search Foundation has proposed a plan to create a common internet index that can underpin many European search engines.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Ryan Cooper / @ryanlcooper : Google's web crawler is a classic natural monopoly, it should be either heavily regulated or nationalized https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The argument lands mid-campaign: regulators are already probing how Google bundles its ad tools, and the company has staked its defense on choice — insisting people use its search because they want to, not because they must (its response to the DOJ case). What critics like Zack Maril add is a structural target underneath that defense: an index of hundreds of billions of pages that no rival matches, which functions as the keystone of Google's search power.
The framing also revives an old grievance with new legal weight. Foundem's long-running complaint argued years ago that Google's dominance was built by exclusion, not merit, and the later record of two federal judges declaring Google a monopoly suggests courts are increasingly receptive to exactly this kind of structural case.
First-order effects
- Regulators gain a concrete, actionable theory of harm — control of the web index itself — rather than having to litigate search quality or user choice, directly challenging Google's 'people choose us' position.
- Google now has to defend not just its ranking practices but the scale of its indexing operation, where its advantage over every rival is largest and hardest to explain as consumer preference.
Second-order effects
- Competitors and would-be entrants acquire a policy ask they can rally around: mandated access to, or interoperability with, Google's index — turning the index from a private asset into a candidate regulated input.
- The Open Search Foundation's proposal for a common internet index backing many European search engines gets a stronger case, positioning a public-interest alternative as the natural remedy if US scrutiny validates the index-as-bottleneck argument.
Third-order effects
- If courts accept the index as essential infrastructure, digital-market enforcement shifts from policing specific conduct (bundling, exclusivity) toward governing foundational data assets — a template extendable beyond search to any scale-advantaged dataset.
- Sustained scrutiny of the index could restructure search itself into layered markets — crawlers, index providers, query interfaces — eroding the single vertically integrated model Google currently embodies.
The trend: Antitrust attention is migrating from consumer-facing products down to the underlying data infrastructure — indexes, ad stacks, training corpora — where platform power actually originates.