DuckDuckGo and three search rivals urge EU lawmakers to act against Google with new laws, saying they have yet to see positive results from an antitrust ruling
DuckDuckGo and three other search engine rivals to Google on Thursday urged EU lawmakers to take action against the Alphabet …
Context & Ripple Effects
This appeal closes a loop that opened in late 2018, when EU antitrust regulators sent questionnaires to Google's search competitors asking how the company's practices affected rival services — a canvass that put rivals' complaints on the record years before any remedy landed. By 2020, DuckDuckGo's practical position was still weak enough that it lost Google's own Q4 auction for placement on Android's default-search choice screen in large EU markets.
Against that backdrop, the letter is an admission that enforcement already on the books hasn't moved market share, so DuckDuckGo and three peers are shifting their lobbying from the courts to new legislation. The later arc bears out why they kept pushing: by 2025 the EU was preparing to charge Google under the DMA after proposed search-result changes failed to satisfy regulators (set to charge), even as Google countered that the law was hampering innovation and demanded evidence from critics (warns on DMA).
First-order effects
- EU lawmakers are now the direct audience: DuckDuckGo and its three co-signatories are asking for legislation rather than waiting on the existing antitrust ruling, whose results they say they have not seen.
- Google faces a two-front problem in Europe — legacy antitrust findings it can argue are ineffective, and a legislative track that could harden requirements beyond what case-by-case rulings impose.
Second-order effects
- If lawmakers respond, the burden shifts onto Google to demonstrate compliance through product changes like choice screens — the same auction mechanism where DuckDuckGo previously lost placement — making default-placement economics the contested ground.
- Other Google critics gain precedent: a successful legislative push by four small search firms would give later complainants, including US voices aligned with Weinberg, a template for bypassing slow court remedies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search competition policy moves from adjudicating individual abuses to structurally legislating access points — defaults, result placement, interoperability — which is exactly where the EU's later DMA charges against Google landed.
- Sustained regulation aimed at distribution channels could gradually reprice the value of being a default, altering how much any entrant must spend to buy reach that incumbents get by contract.
The trend: Search rivals are losing faith in court remedies and pushing legislators to regulate Google's default-and-placement economics directly — the trajectory that runs from 2018 questionnaires to the DMA charges.