For more than nine in ten internet searches in Britain, there is only one door. On September 23, the country’s competition regulator took another step toward forcing Google to install a few more.
The Competition and Markets Authority strengthened proposals that would require Android phone and Chrome browser users to be offered a clearer choice of rival search engines during initial setup and, in a new twist, would fold AI search services into that choice. Google will have a chance to respond before the rules are finalized.
The move is the latest escalation in a campaign that began when the United Kingdom’s digital-markets law took effect in January and the regulator designated Google with “strategic market status” over its search and advertising business. Google Search accounts for more than 90 percent of all general search queries in the country, and more than 200,000 British firms spend a combined total of more than ten billion pounds a year trying to appear in it.
The law underpinning the campaign is among the strongest of its kind. The digital-markets regime, which came into force in January, lets the agency impose conduct requirements on companies it designates as having strategic market status, a label it has applied to Google’s search and advertising businesses and to its mobile platform. Unlike traditional antitrust, which can drag through courts for years, the regime is designed to move quickly, which is why Google faces binding remedies rather than a lawsuit with no end date.
The AI search provision is the striking part. As users begin posing questions to chatbots rather than typing keywords into a box, the regulator is trying to ensure that the next generation of search does not simply reproduce the current one’s dominance. People familiar with the regulator’s thinking said the goal is to lock in competition at the moment the market is being remade, before habits form and one company, whether Google or a rival, inherits the whole field.
The AI provision speaks to a market that is changing faster than regulators typically move. Google has folded AI-generated answers into its own results, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a handful of startups now answer questions directly, without sending users to a list of links. Each is competing to become the place where questions get asked, and each hopes to own the advertising that follows. The CMA’s proposal would, in effect, require that the competition for that role begin at the first moment a consumer turns on a new phone.
Britain has been among the most aggressive jurisdictions in the world on this front. Its digital-markets regime gives the CMA the power to impose conduct requirements on designated firms without the years of litigation that antitrust cases typically require. The agency has already designated Google’s mobile platform and its search and advertising businesses, and has spent the year pressing for changes to how the company presents choices to users.
The choice-screen mechanism itself is borrowed from Europe, and its record there is instructive. Under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, Google has had to offer Android users a selection of search providers, a remedy that produced mixed results. Rivals reported only modest gains from the screens, and critics said the design gave the incumbent an advantage that outweighed the appearance of choice. Britain’s regulator has said it is designing its version to avoid those failures.
Google’s position is that the remedies go too far. The company has argued that users already can switch search engines freely, that choice screens add friction rather than real competition, and that the CMA’s remedies risk degrading a product people use because it works. The company has until the rules are settled to make that case in full.
The AI dimension changes the stakes. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and a cluster of startups are all racing to become the default way people get answers, and whoever controls that default controls the advertising that follows it. A choice screen that includes AI assistants alongside traditional search engines would, in theory, force the competition for the next search paradigm to happen in the open, at the moment a user sets up a new device.
Whether it works depends on execution, and on a user base that has so far shown little appetite for switching. Choice screens have a habit of disappointing their architects, and the history of European remedies is not encouraging. But Britain is pressing ahead anyway, betting that the moment to intervene is now, while the market is still forming.
For Google, the proposal lands at an uncomfortable time. The company is defending its search business in the United States, where a federal judge has weighed structural changes, and in Europe, where it faces the strictest rules of any major market. The British rules, if they land as proposed, would make the company’s grip on the front door of the internet one degree weaker, at exactly the moment the door is being replaced.
