Motion prep
British Parliamentary · econ · Medium

This House would break up Google.

An antitrust motion that turns on whether the harm is monopoly power or something structural breakup cannot reach.

Runs inBP / APDA / Policy adaptable
DifficultyMedium
SidesProposition / Opposition
Reading the motion
What it asks

Whether the state should force divestiture, typically separating search from advertising, Android, YouTube, and cloud.

Who proves what

Prop must name the cut. "Break up Google" without a separation line invites Opp to pick the least defensible version and argue against that.

Ground worth taking

Prop should take the ad-tech separation, splitting the buy side, sell side, and exchange, because that is the cut US and EU regulators have actually pursued and it has a live evidentiary record.

Both cases
Proposition

Google sits on both sides of the ad auction and owns the exchange, which is a conflict no conduct remedy has fixed.

01 Structural conflict, structural remedy
Claim
Operating the buyer, the seller, and the marketplace at once is a position no referee should hold.
Warrant
Court filings in the US ad-tech case describe internal programs that adjusted auction mechanics in Google's favor. Behavioral remedies require a regulator to monitor an auction running billions of times daily, which is not a supervisable task.
Impact
Only separation removes the incentive. Every conduct decree since 2010 has been followed by a new variant of the same conduct.
02 Publishers absorb the tax
Claim
Google takes a cut at each layer of the stack it controls.
Warrant
Estimates from the UK CMA put the total take rate across the chain at roughly 30 cents of every advertiser dollar. Publishers cannot route around a stack that includes the dominant exchange.
Impact
The transfer runs at industry scale every year and falls hardest on news publishers, which is where the downstream civic harm shows up.
03 Default deals foreclose entry
Claim
Paying to be the default search engine buys the market rather than winning it.
Warrant
Google pays Apple a sum in the tens of billions annually for default placement. A rival cannot outbid that without the revenue that only default placement produces.
Impact
Entry is blocked by a mechanism unrelated to product quality, so the market cannot self-correct on any timeframe.
Opposition

The product is free, the switching cost is one click, and breakup trades an integrated service for a worse one at real user cost.

01 Consumers are not paying more
Claim
The classic antitrust harm, supra-competitive prices, is absent.
Warrant
Search, maps, and mail are free at the point of use. The advertiser-side harm is real but it is a dispute between commercial parties, not a consumer-welfare case.
Impact
Prop is asking for the most invasive remedy in the antitrust toolkit against a firm whose users are not being overcharged. That standard, once relaxed, applies to every large integrated firm.
02 Integration produces the quality
Claim
Search, Android, and Maps improve each other through shared signal.
Warrant
Ranking quality depends on cross-product behavioral data. Separated entities cannot share it, which is the point of the separation and also the mechanism of the degradation.
Impact
Users get a worse product immediately while the competitive benefit is speculative and arrives years later, if at all.
03 The threat is already elsewhere
Claim
Search behavior is fragmenting to AI assistants, TikTok, and Amazon.
Warrant
Product discovery increasingly starts on Amazon, and conversational AI is absorbing informational queries. Google's share of the actual job is falling without intervention.
Impact
Breakup remedies a 2015 market in 2026. Prop should show why the market cannot correct itself, and the current shift is evidence that it can.
The clash that decides it

Is the ad-tech conflict of interest reachable by conduct remedies, or does it require separation?

How Proposition wins it
Prop wins by showing every conduct decree has been evaded, which makes supervision structurally impossible rather than merely difficult.
How Opposition wins it
Opp wins by narrowing the harm to advertisers, proposing targeted ad-market rules, and pricing the user-side quality loss that breakup imposes on everyone.
Where rounds go wrong
Proposition mistakes
  • Arguing Google is too big. Size is not an antitrust theory; conduct and foreclosure are.
  • Leaving the separation line unnamed. Opp gets to pick the version they can beat.
Opposition mistakes
  • Claiming there is no harm. The ad-tech record is strong and denying it costs credibility on everything else.
  • Skipping the free-to-consumer framing. It is your best structural answer to the whole case.
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