District Court Judge Ruled Google Is An Illegal Monopolist In Online Search And Advertising

Judge Amit Mehta of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the industry of online search as well as online advertising. In their verdict of the matter of United States v. Google LLC (2020), with the United States Department of Justice being the prosecution, Judge Mehta stated "The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and that Google has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The court found that with Google maintaining 90% of the online search market and 95% on smartphones, and a massive share of online advertising through programs like AMP and Adsense, it is an illegal monopoly in the areas of online search and online advertising requiring judicial remedies. In particular, the judge stated that Google's Chrome browser and Android OS setting Google search as its default represent anti-competitive and illegal behavior. This is on par with what EU regulators have already found, and as a result of EU regulators already citing Google as an illegal search monopoly, EU Android-based phones have started shipping with a randomized default search engine.

Google's defense is that their search engine and online marketing tools and suite are among the most popular because they are a vastly superior product compared to the rest of the field. However, Google completely kneecapped their case when documents and emails leaked in April of this year basically proving that Google was aware that its search was getting worse and that it needed to more closely tie it with its own internal ad system to boost revenue, which Google claimed on record was not the case. The emails also show internal discussion about how Google knew other search engines were getting technologically better and that hey had to do something to steer Chrome and Android users to their ecosystems. The judge even notes that Google spent $26.3 billion in 2021 alone to maintain its search engine dominance. Regardless of the verdict by the District judge, Google has already vowed to appeal, which

In siding with the Department of Justice and saying that Google violated the Sherman Act, specifically, the verdict of this ruling, if not overruled in appeal, has specific penalties for Google if it refuses to budge. The penalties, if Google doesn't change its practices, are "Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding." While Google remains a monolith in the field of tech, being regularly fined $100 million isn't something it is likely willing to stomach. Also, the ruling paves the way to a potential breakup of Alphabet, the owner of Google search.

In terms of breaking the business up, if the Court of Appeals concurs with the verdict of the district judge, and an appeal to the Supreme Court fails or is not heard, Google would be provided with a timetable to divest this part of the business or make concessions to bolster competition. Which of those two Google would opt for depends on their consent decree, which would be worked between the federal government, Google, and the district court judge after their appeal fails, if it fails. United States v. AT&T is the typical example of what is done if the appeal fails and the consent decree signs off with divestment. United States v. Microsoft Corp is a commonly cited norm for a concessions-based consent decree. However, the "remedy" phase of this verdict is unlikely to resolve any time soon especially with Google already indicating it will appeal to higher courts.

Good. Hopefully this holds up through appeal.

Google's been blatant in their attempts at locking people into their ecosystem and making it difficult to escape having to use their products. Like as blatant as Microsoft was in the 90s and early 00s when they got in trouble for similar reasons.

Chrome is the perfect example of what Google's been doing the last decade that super sucks. Google originally released Chrome as this fancy new open browser that would help people be free of the evil Internet Explorer. Chrome was built to be hugely compatible with all of the web standards that other browsers followed and generally if you made a web page or app, it would be trivially compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari (and the smaller browsers, but the big deal was that everything worked on those 3, giving users legitimate options other than Internet Explorer). Chrome from the launch of beta until around 2015 was an excellent browser. Then things started to change.

After Chrome established market dominance (last I checked they have comfortably more than half of the browser market across mobile and desktop), suddenly that openness and widespread cross-compatibility started to disappear bit by bit. Chrome has had non-standardized features added to it that don't work in other browsers, forcing people who have to use certain sites or apps for work/school onto Chrome for compatibility reasons. Now we're at the point where there's a non-trivial number of web apps that only work in Chrome and tend to break in all of the other browsers. They're literally copying what Microsoft did in the late 90s and through the 00s with Internet Explorer.

Coupling in what Google have done with Chrome and Android with their forcing of Google as the default search engine, they're following a very similar pattern to what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and Windows back in the day. Internet Explorer was included with Windows. By default it used a rudimentary Microsoft-branded search bar and sent you to a Microsoft homepage (I think MSN?) filled with ads that made them money. At that time, browser cross-compatibility was essentially non-existent. You had to take specific steps to build websites to be compatible with IE, and often doing so broke the sites on other browsers. IE had such market dominance that many web developers gave up and purely developed sites for IE. I was a Firefox user back then (and still am) and it wasn't rare to run into websites that would tell you to open the site in IE if you wanted to use certain features. It got bad enough that non-IE browsers had to add IE compatibility modes so that portions of the internet could be usable for their users. We're now approaching a similar situation with Chrome.

All of this context makes Google's decision to deliberately serve worse search results that maximize ad revenue for them that much uglier. If they didn't have such dominance over the search and browser market, they would have been punished for this. It's been openly talked about in even less technical circles that Google search sucks now. The problem of course is that they don't really have competition. They should have given the scale of companies they're theoretically in competition with but Microsoft is too busy chasing AI and shooting themselves in the feet repeatedly to make any meaningful moves in the search space right now. Bing went from being a competent competitor to Google Search, and by a lot of metrics better than Google, to somehow being even worse and more enshittified than Google Search. Both companies are in a race to the bottom because there's nobody that's large enough to steal user share from them. There are starting to be new, credible (sorry Duck Duck Go. I appreciate what you do but you just aren't a good search engine) non-Google and Microsoft search options, but their marketshare is in the single digits and some of them charge money in exchange for the better results, which immediately kills any chance they have at being big.

Hopefully this all works out. Google has become an actively harmful company to the world and something needs to change with how they're being handled because it can't continue like this.

This all seems good, but can someone explain to me what this potentially might mean in the end to users? Will Google searches suck a little less? That sounds facetious but I genuinely am not sure what any of these means to the actual people using search engines.

A possible simple solution that users will see is something along the lines of the first time you fire up a new Chrome install or a new Android phone, you'll be asked for your search engine preference and the OS or browser will have to respect it (or it'll be what happens in the EU, which is it randomly picks a search engine then you can change it if you want). Something similar may also happen in Safari and at the OS level on Apple devices since Google currently has a deal with Apple where they pay them billions of dollars for the privilege of being the default search engine on literally every Apple device. Google's possibly going to be blocked from making these kind of deals with Apple and the various Android phone makers, who also get kickbacks for setting Google as the default search engine.

Apple's been thinking about making their own search engine for years now, but a major factor in them opting not to make one was the huge amount of money they received from Google as part of their deal and the fact that losing the Google search deal money would lose them billions over five years (their own search engine would partly make up for the loss in revenue, but not enough to pay for what they were making from their Google deals). Without that Google deal in place, it's likely Apple will either go forward with making their own search engine or possibly buying a smaller one. So potentially as a result of this case we may see other non-Google search engines pop up and become more popular since Google can't pay other companies to use Google instead of looking at other options (including building their own engine like Apple has thought about).

As for whether this will make search suck less, that's a complicated one that will depend on the final outcome of this case and another anti-trust case about Google's advertising monopoly that's about to start in September (yes, there are multiple different anti-trust cases going on regarding Google. And that's just the US. There's also been more in the EU. They're really bad at hiding that they're a monopoly). In the short term, nothing will change. Google will still probably suck unless the press around it gets so bad that they finally undo some of the awful changes they've made to search the last couple years. Negative press has already influenced them this year in other areas so it could happen. They significantly slowed their rollout of their AI tool Gemini after receiving a bunch of negative press about the tool giving out embarrassingly bad results to people's queries.

I think it's funny since I've personally been using Duck Duck Go as my search for years now, though that engine also has its share of issues. All I know is that Youtube, and many other social media platforms Google own, started to go downhill the moment they took over. If this ruling has something to do with that, then I'm all for it.

@ben_h: Hey, thanks! That's very informative. Much appreciated.

Google's next anti-trust case with the US government, this time about their alleged advertising monopoly, is beginning today. This one is about how Google essentially controls all aspects of a huge portion of the internet ad market and over the years has made a series of moves that both give itself huge advantages while choking out most competition.