For the first time in over 20 years, the American government has won an antitrust claim against a tech giant. A federal judge ruled Monday that Google did indeed break antitrust laws in an effort to hold their monopoly on Internet searches.
“Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Monday, four years after the Department of Justice’s initial 2020 lawsuits.
According to the 277-page ruling obtained by TheWrap, it is unjust for Google to pay other companies like Apple, Verizon and Samsung to be the automatic search engine for “browser developers, mobile device manufacturers and wireless carriers.” In the coming months, Mehta will provide next steps to fix the monopoly, including potentially selling parts of Alphabet, though the court is not imposing sanctions at this time.
The ruling further stated that Google is thwarting its competition by paying to be default distribution in the field, an act that violates Section 2 of the 1890 Sherman Act. It also listed Bing as Google’s next biggest competitor, noting that the Nos. 3 and 4 biggest search engines — Yahoo and DuckDuckGo — just get their results from Bing.
“Because many users simply stick to searching with the default, Google receives billions of queries every day through those access points. Google derives extraordinary volumes of user data from such searches,” per the documents. “Google so values such data that, absent a user-initiated change, it stores 18 months-worth of a user’s search history and activity … more users mean more advertisers, and more advertisers mean more revenues. As queries on Google have grown, so too has the amount it earns in advertising dollars.”
“Importantly, the court also finds that Google has exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive prices for general search text ads. That conduct has allowed Google to earn monopoly profits,” the docs continued. “It is Google’s status as a monopolist that makes its distribution contracts exclusionary, even if the same conduct did not have that effect when Google first began employing it.”
Coincidentally, former President Donald Trump publicly spoke out against Google in his livestream with Adin Ross the same day as the ruling, saying, “Something is wrong with Google … everybody should maybe go off Google, not use it.”
In 2001, the United States sued Microsoft for having monopoly of its own, which resulted in the company modifying its business practices. Similar ramifications could now be applied to this Google decision.
The New York Times was first to report the news.
