Federal judge finds Google is a search monopoly

The Future. A federal judge has sided with the Department of Justice that Google is a monopoly in both the search and search-powered ad market — the biggest antitrust ruling since the case against Microsoft in 2000. The verdict may cast a long shadow over similar cases against Amazon, Apple, and Meta. With Google likely forced to scale back its operations, expect OpenAI to take advantage of the opening to plug SearchGPT as a future-focused alternative.

Gaveled
Judge Amit Mehta was behind the largest antitrust ruling since the case against Microsoft in 2000.

Some highlights:

• Google holds a 90% market share in search, which Mehta said doesn’t allow for the hallmarks of a competitive market, such as “fluid market shares, lost business, or new entrants.”
• It also pays phone and browser makers (like $20 billion to Apple in 2022) through revenue sharing to be their default search engine.
• That disincentivizes companies from launching a competing engine to Google Search, even though they have the capability to do so, because of how much money they would miss out on.
• Additionally, Mehta ruled that Google’s power over search allowed it to raise prices on search text ads, not because of an increase in quality, but because Google simply could.

The jury’s still out on what consequences Google will face, but everything from forcing a change of business practice to breaking up the company is on the table. 

And with Google back in the hot seat starting September 9th over its digital ad tech, the tech giant may be in store for another bad result.