On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Google had violated antitrust laws to achieve its dominance in the search engine market, where it currently holds over 90% of the market share.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S District Court for the District of Columbia said in his ruling.
The antitrust lawsuit was first brought forth by the Justice Department in 2020, with the goal of restraining Google from “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices, and to remedy the effects of this conduct,” the original document said.
They claimed that Google pays billions of dollars per year to third-parties to be the default search engine across devices and operating systems. Specifically, the lawsuit said Google pays device manufacturers Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung; U.S. wireless carriers AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and browser developers Mozilla, Opera, and UCWeb. They also said that some of these agreements prevent those companies from working with competitors.
In Mehta’s ruling, he wrote that just in 2021, Google spent $26 billion on agreements like these. He also highlighted the importance of being the default setting by claiming that Microsoft Bing has 80% of the share of search on the Microsoft Edge browser.
This trial lasted 10 weeks in 2023, during which time the Justice Department reviewed evidence, including testimony from Google, Microsoft, and Apple executives. Much of the judge’s ruling cited a landmark 2000 antitrust ruling against Microsoft for practices it was using to make it difficult to install web browsers other than Internet Explorer on Windows machines (The word “Microsoft” appeared 266 times in the 286 page document).
Many believe that the ruling against Google will similarly impact other ongoing antitrust investigations. Current lawsuits that are underway include Amazon for favoring its own products and services on its marketplace over third-party sellers, Apple for blocking companies that offer apps that compete with its own, and Meta for buying Instagram and WhatsApp. There is also a second antitrust lawsuit against Google that was filed in January 2023 that relates to its online advertising practices, which is set to go to trial in September of this year.
In addition, last month it was reported that Microsoft and OpenAI could be investigated for how tightly OpenAI’s technology has been integrated into Microsoft products, and a couple of days ago it was confirmed that NVIDIA is also being investigated for its dominance of the GPU market.
“This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law. The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce our antitrust laws.”
While the decision against Google has been made, the consequences have not yet been announced. There will be a hearing on September 6 to determine what changes Google needs to make or what penalties it will face. Google will also have the opportunity to appeal the ruling, which could draw out the process for years.
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