Google will have to start paying for its ubiquity.
On Monday, Federal Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google had indeed broken antitrust laws by monopolizing online search and general search ad markets. It did so by paying companies likes Apple and Samsung billions to make Google their products’ default search engine. The case has echoes of 1998, when Microsoft was deemed to have similarly monopolized the computer operating system market.
“Google’s dominance has gone unchallenged for well over a decade,” wrote Judge Amit Mehta. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for any person to “monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations…”
In his ruling, Judge Mehta noted that nearly 90% of all search queries in 2020, when the case was brought, were with Google, preventing search engines like Microsoft’s Bing, or Duckduckgo from finding a foothold in the market.
“There is no evidence that any rival constrains Google’s pricing decisions,” wrote Mehta. He ruled that those unconstrained pricing decisions “have fueled Google’s dramatic revenue growth and allowed it to maintain high and remarkably stable operating profits.”
Last year, Google reached an agreement with the Federal government in a dispute over the Online News Act (or Bill C-18), which aims to “regulate digital platforms that act as intermediaries in Canada’s news media ecosystem in order to enhance fairness in the Canadian digital news market.” The Act is meant to give Canadians continuous access to trusted news sources by manadating that dominant digital platforms provide compensation to local news outlets. Earlier in the summer, Google also announced that it had signed an agreement with the Canadian Journalism Collective to distribute $100 million to Canadian companies.
