Another week, another conference: I’ve made my way to the SEASON (Search Engines and Society Network) 2026 conference in Hamburg, which is now in ist second year, and we start with a keynote by Thomas Höppner, who brings a legal perspective to the question of search engines and their role in society. Search engines serve as gatekeepers to information, and therefore have a key role to play in democracy: information is the currency and lifeblood of democracy (and indeed today is the International Day of Democracy, as it turns out).
So, if information is the currency of democracy, then the holders of that information are its banks: traditionally, these might be libraries, but today, it’s search engines that facilitate the circulation of that currency. Yet search engines remain very secretive about how search engines work: how they rank and select the information they return in response to a query. Search engine companies themselves have admitted this; and this is by design, since search and associated services are big business and search algorithms are commercial properties.
Search is a three-sided market: it connects publishers, advertisers, and users. Indeed, search is now the most successful advertising market in the world: everyone searches, and everyone sees the more or less targeted ads that come with such searches. But this also raises the question of commercial interests: are users now shown the ‘best’ result, whatever this might be, or the most profitable one? Are advertisers being exploited by search engines? Are publishers unable to make themselves visible without paying for this? In short, what still upholds the principles of a free, open Web, and what are the consequences of this failing?
Over the past ten years or so, these questions have triggered a range of competition law cases, especially in the EU; some of these have already been decided against Google, some are still pending a final result. A US case on Google Search in 2024, which drew on anti-trust law, claimed that Google had established a monopoly on general (organic) search services and general text advertising, for instance.
For organic search, this is especially also because Google is preset as the default search engine in many mobile devices (such as Android) and Web browsers (such as Chrome – both owned by the same company as Google). Since users rarely change those defaults, this places Google in a monopoly position. Similarly, since there is no competition in search advertising on Google, it is able to charge whatever prices for advertising it wants, limited only by bad PR or consumer complaints. And advertising investment has grown massively at the global level. What is no longer clear now is whether and how this affects the organic results: searching for a specific brand, for instance, now returns plenty of paid results ahead of the brand the user is actually searching for, and brands need to pay in order to reverse this trend.
This is now further complicated by the rise of generative AI in a search context. At the time of the 2024 court case, AI had not yet been expected to impact on search results, but this has changed rapidly in recent years: while Google remains the dominant firm in the search market by far, the rise of AI has changed the playing field; but it also remains unclear exactly how these processes will unfold. In the aftermath of the 2024 case, this led the judge to decide against breaking up Alphabet to undo the integration of Google, Android, and Chrome with each other.
Another US case, in 2025, addressed the advertising technology market more directly: this is about the systems behind the scene which select and display adverts as a user navigates to a specific Web page. Google now owns many of these services companies, too, monopolising ad tech and creating a conflict of interest between those of its services which are used by advertisers to supply potential ads and by publishers to select the ads that best fit their user profiles.
This Google control over the entire advertising ecosystem reduces competition and thereby increases costs for advertisers as well as publishers, and French, EU, and finally US court decisions have regarded these practices as anti-competitive. And this matters because digital advertising is the lifeblood of the Internet: it finances the operations of many publishers and services, and Google’s exploitative conduct, as a party sitting on both sides of the advertising auctioning process, jeopardises this.
Further, a 20-year EU case on Google’s self-preferencing eventually found that Google unlawfully favoured its own services in search results; over the course of this case Google increased its revenue from US$29b to US$348b, in part because of this self-preferencing. Searching for a specific product category on Google, the search engine provides a direct comparison of relevant products from various vendors; this gives it a clear advantage over other product comparison and shopping Websites, which may only appear in subsequent ads and organic results. The effect of this can be seen in shopper traffic patterns over the years.
In response to such criticism, Google made several proposals on how to fix this, but it turned out that these would only slightly change the effects of Google’s market dominance, or that they would even drive further revenue to Google. Self-preferencing continues to this day, and in July this year the EU Commission fined Google some €890m for its continued breaches of the EU Digital Markets Act. These breaches now cover shopping, flight booking, train booking, accommodation booking, local business listing, translation, sports results, and gaming services, amongst others.
Further, a new EU case was launched in 2025 to address Google’s site reputation abuse policy: this focusses especially on vendor discounts and coupons, and downranks Websites in search results that cooperate with outside coupon providers, and especially also resulted in the downranking of some major news publishers. The EU Commission has pushed back strongly against this practice, much as it has also against Google’s employment of AI Overviews in search results, which has substantially (often by more than one third) reduced click-through traffic to the actual Websites on which AI Overviews draw.
Indeed, the emergence of AI suggests that history may be repeating itself: Alphabet-owned AI Gemini’s services are now embedded into Android and Chrome, for instance, and AI Overviews further reduce competition and increase Google’s dominance in search. It is unlikely that US courts or the federal administration is likely to push back against this, given the current state of US politics, so EU interventions may be our best hope here.
What will matter here, for the free circulation of information as the currency of democracy, is who is crawled and indexed, who is ranked and made visible, and under what commercial conditions this happens. Search engines remain the kingmakers of digital society, and their influence remains critical.
