A federal court in the United States has ruled that Google unlawfully abused its monopoly, impacting the entire search industry. This decision was made in response to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice and several states in 2020.
“Google is a monopolist, and it acted as a monopolist to maintain its monopoly,” wrote Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in his ruling. “This violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
The lawsuit claimed that Google engaged in illegal practices to uphold its dominant position in search through various actions. For instance, Google paid companies like Apple, Samsung, and Mozilla billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on their devices and browsers. The Department of Justice argued that Google constitutes nearly 90% of web searches and, by paying to be the default option, it prevented competitors from achieving the scale needed for effective competition. As a result, Google is believed to benefit in terms of revenue and data collection.
According to Mehta, Google acknowledged that losing its position as the default search engine on different platforms would harm its profits.
“For example, Google predicts that losing Safari as the default search engine will lead to a significant drop in queries and billions in lost revenue,” the ruling stated.
During the court proceedings, Google maintained that its significant market share in search was due to a superior product that consumers prefer. Commenting on the judge's ruling, Google’s representative Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs, reiterated that the company provides the best search and that this is acknowledged in the ruling.
“This ruling recognizes that Google offers the best search engine but concludes that we should not be allowed to make it easily accessible.”
Additionally, the Department of Justice claimed that Google holds a monopoly on the advertisements displayed in search results. The department asserted that Google artificially inflated advertising prices beyond what they would be in a free market.
In his ruling, Mehta agreed that “Google has exercised its monopoly power by setting excessively competitive prices for general search text advertising. This behavior allowed Google to earn monopoly profits.” However, the judge added that Google does not possess monopoly power in the broader search advertising market.
At the same time, Mehta declined to impose sanctions on Google for failing to preserve employee chat records that could be relevant to the case. The ruling noted that since 2008, Google has automatically deleted internal employee chat messages after 24 hours.
So far, Judge Amit Mehta has not imposed any legal remedies against Google. The judge may require Google to alter its operations or even divest parts of its business.
Source: Engadget
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