On Monday, a federal judge found that Google had unlawfully monopolized the internet search and advertising industries for the previous decade, handing a comprehensive victory to the Justice Department and a number of state attorneys general.
A 286-page decision from Washington, D.C.’s U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found that Google had cornered the market on internet searches by forming partnerships with companies like Apple to power its Safari web browser and with mobile carriers like Verizon and Samsung. In addition, Mehta discovered that Google illegally dominated the market for advertisements shown next to search results by giving Microsoft an unfair advantage.
Google has maintained its monopoly by acting like a monopolist, according to Judge Mehta’s ruling.
Requests for comment were not promptly addressed by representatives from the Department of Justice and Google.
The verdict, which came after a 10-week bench trial that ended in November, is a huge win for the partisan movement that began under Trump and has been going strong under Biden in its fight against the dominance of a small number of tech companies.
As the Trump administration came to a close in 2020, a landmark antitrust lawsuit was filed against a major tech giant. This was the first such action since the government fought Microsoft in the late 1990s. Several lawsuits that were filed in the years that followed, targeting Meta, Amazon, Apple, and a second Google-related case, were all positively impacted by the verdict.
The decision “will have a similar landmark effect as the government’s challenge to Microsoft more than 20 years ago and provides a historic boost to the antitrust authorities’ endeavor to rein in the abuse of market power by Google and other dominant tech companies,” according to Florian Ederer, an economics and antitrust professor at Boston University. “The victory also proves that antitrust laws enacted more than a century ago are relevant and effective in the modern day.”
Now that Mehta has decided if Google did in fact violate the law, the more difficult issue of how to remedy the situation can be raised. A remedy will now be tried in its own trial.
In its statement stating its focus on the initial phase and its intention to adjust any requests to the court’s judgment, the DOJ remained mute about what it wants. Nonetheless, antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter has often voiced his support for so-called structural remedies, which usually include a merger or separation. Additionally, the Department of Justice is interested in any solutions that can curb anticompetitive behavior in the AI development process.
A number of Google revenue-sharing agreements with companies like Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, and others have been at the heart of the years-long lawsuit. These deals are valued at tens of billions of dollars anually. Thanks to them, Google becomes the go-to search engine for most mobile and web browsers, and it gets to decide which advertising show up in search results.
Though Google remains tight-lipped about the specific amounts, trial documents reveal that in 2021 alone, Apple received about $26 billion. The Department of Justice claims that these contracts have made it harder for competitors to compete and have prevented customers from getting the kind of creative, high-quality services that are possible because of healthy competition.
Former President Obama’s appointee Mehta was equally critical of Google’s strategy for archiving internal conversations. He mentioned that unless an employee activates a feature to keep them, internal chat messages are destroyed after 24 hours. In his ruling, the judge expressed his surprise at Google’s efforts to conceal user conversations from regulators and litigants, calling attention to the company’s “Communicate with Care” program that aims to protect user messages from legal action.
Until the disputed lawsuit had been ongoing for two years, Mehta said, Google did nothing to save its pertinent chat communications. He scolded the company and its attorneys, but he finally turned down a punishment request from the state and federal governments, claiming that the lost messages wouldn’t have affected his analysis. Businesses risk disaster if they trust their employees to find and keep important evidence. Google was able to evade penalties in this instance. He cautioned that the following one might not be as fortunate.
Kanter, the aggressive lawyer who President Joe Biden appointed to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust section, will feel vindicated by the decision. While serving as an independent attorney, Kanter contributed to the development of the case that had been initiated during the administration of former President Donald Trump.
Also, back in 2013, when regulators were looking at signs that Google was growing into a digital powerhouse, the Obama administration chose not to sue. Now the DOJ is picking up where they left off.
This is just the beginning. The case will most certainly drag on for a long time due to remedy processes and Google’s appeals. On the other hand, the corporation will need the court’s approval before it can automatically appeal the current verdict.
