A federal judge has ruled that Google violated U.S. antitrust laws by maintaining a monopoly in search and advertising markets.
“After carefully considering and weighing the witness testimony and evidence, the court concludes that Google is a monopoly and that it has maintained its monopoly position,” the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story, reads. “It violates Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling represents a major victory for the Justice Department, which accused Google of illegally monopolizing the online search market. It’s unclear exactly what this means for the future of Google’s business, as this preliminary finding only concerns Google’s liability, not remedies.
The verdict is the first in a wave of technology monopoly cases brought by the U.S. government in recent years. While 20 years have passed between the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft and the next tech antitrust case filed against Google in 2020, several such cases followed soon after. Amazon, Apple and Meta now face monopoly lawsuits from the U.S. government, while Google is set to go to trial this fall for a second time against the U.S. Department of Justice over a separate challenge to its ad tech business. That makes Mehta’s decision in this case even more important for how other judges consider how century-old antitrust laws apply to modern digital markets.
Last fall, Mehta oversaw a 10-week trial in the Google search case that culminated in two days of closing arguments in early May. The trial, held in Washington District Court, brought together many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Apple executive Eddie Cue. The U.S. Department of Justice believes that Google has effectively cut off key distribution channels of competitors through exclusive contracts, thus illegally monopolizing the general search advertising market. For example, Google has agreements with browser makers such as Mozilla and mobile phone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung to make its search engine the default search engine for their products. Google also makes the default status of some of its apps a condition of access to the Play Store for phone makers using its Android operating system.
Google argued throughout the trial that it did not engage in anticompetitive behavior and that its huge market share was the result of creating high-quality products that consumers loved. It argued that Google’s search business should be compared to a wider range of peers than the government proposed in its market definition, suggesting that it competes directly with other platforms where search is an important part of the business, even if they do not index the web (e.g. Amazon).
In his closing arguments, Mehta focused on these payments and wondered how other players in the market could take Google’s place. Since only companies with enough capital to offer a comparable or better deal to Apple, and the ability to create a high-quality search engine with limited user data, would have a chance, Mehta asked: “If someone would need to do this to move Google from default Expelled from search engines.
