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Google’s massive search business violates US antitrust laws, DC District Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Monday, in a major victory for the Justice Department.
The decision is a rare defeat for the tech giant after years as the dominant player in the online search industry and could fundamentally alter how people find information online.
Google spent billions on exclusivity contracts with smartphone and web browser makers to make Google Search the default search engine. It currently holds 90% of the online search market, Reuters reported, and 95% on smartphones.
Rival search engines like Microsoft’s Bing couldn’t compete, prosecutors argued. Google insisted at the trial that the reason why it was the default wasn’t to do with the billions of dollars it spent, but because its products are just better.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his opinion.
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This is the US Department of Justice’s biggest victory against a tech company, and was widely seen as a test of whether antitrust laws enacted in the 19th century could stand up to Big Tech.
The ruling will change how users find information online. Much of the web is produced in such a way as to make it easy to find on Google Search, and that organizing principle could change or even disappear. More users could also choose to use alternative search engines that offer different results with varying levels of quality, creating an even more splintered information environment.
It could also have far-reaching implications for how consumer technology, such as phones and laptops, behave when users first turn them on. Apple products, for example, default to Google Search in the Safari browser — it’s possible Apple will need to let users choose a search engine during device setup as a default, instead.
And Google itself could be forced to change: It is possible that Judge Mehta will decide to try and break Google’s sprawling business up. A future hearing will determine what remedies Google will have to make.
The ruling could also have implications for antitrust lawsuits filed against other tech companies, including Apple (over its smartphone business), Meta (for buying out competitors), and Amazon (for its third-party seller policies), The New York Times noted. While many of these suits were filed during the Trump administration, Biden has made it a larger priority.
“It’s a very prominent test of the Biden administration’s new antitrust enforcement agenda,” a law professor at Vanderbilt University told the newspaper.
The View From Google
In a statement after the judgment, Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker said, “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available... Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal. As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”
Notable
- The trial was seen by some tech commentators as an airing of grievances against Google, as successive executives, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, took the stand to testify.
- Google’s stock price recently took a hit after OpenAI announced it will release a search engine of its own built into ChatGPT, the first major competition for Google Search from the AI startup.