Update: Google has released a statement in response to Judge Mehta’s decision:
“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available. We appreciate the Court’s finding that Google is ‘the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users,’ that Google ‘has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices,’ ‘has continued to innovate in search’ and that ‘Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior.’ 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.”
Judge Amit Mehta has ruled in favor of the US Department of Justice in its case against Google. Judge Mehta writes that Google has maintained a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” says the court’s ruling.
This is a major victory for the DOJ, which has had a pretty bad track record in antitrust cases under President Biden. However, it’s not yet clear what this will mean for the future of Google’s business since this is about Google’s liability and not about remedies. This is the first monopoly case in a wave of cases brought on by the US government recently. It’s been nearly two decades since the last major monopoly case, which was against Microsoft. The government is also suing Amazon, Apple, and Meta for monopolistic practices.
Google argues that it was not acting anticompetitively
Throughout the ten-week trial that Judge Mehta oversaw, Google continued to argue that it was not acting anti-competitive and that its large market share was a result of creating a superior product. Google also argued that its search business should be compared to a much larger range of peers than the government proposed in its market definition. Arguing that it competes directly with other platforms where search is a bit part of business, even if they aren’t indexing the web – like Amazon.
In this case, we also learned how much Google is paying Apple to remain the default search engine on the iPhone (and iPad). That’s $20 billion in 2022 alone. Google also let it slip that it pays 36% of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple. Which by itself is very monopolistic.
As for what’s next, another antitrust trial between the DOJ and Google is set to start on September 9. This one is going to be about its ad technology.
2024-08-06 15:08:20