A US federal court has ruled that Google has illegally abused its monopoly over the entire search industry. The decision was made in a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice and several states in 2020.
«Google is a monopoly, and it acted as a monopoly to maintain its monopoly,» Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in the decision. «This violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act».
The lawsuit claimed that Google had acted illegally to maintain its dominant position in search through a number of actions. For example, Google paid companies such as Apple, Samsung and Mozilla billions of dollars a year to be the standard search engine on their phones and browsers. The Justice Department argued that Google provides nearly 90% of web searches and by paying to be the standard option, it prevented competitors from achieving the scale necessary to compete. Thus, it is believed that Google benefits in terms of revenue and data collection.
According to Mehta, Google recognized that losing its position as the standard search engine across platforms would hurt profits.
«For example, Google predicts that the loss of Safari as a standard search engine will lead to a significant reduction in queries and billions of dollars in lost revenue», — the decision says.
During the trial, Google argued that its significant share of the search market was due to a better product that consumers valued. Commenting on the judge’s decision, Google’s Kent Walker, President of Global affairs, reiterated that the company offers the best search, and this is recognized in the decision.
«This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we should not be allowed to make it easily accessible».
In addition, the Ministry of Justice argued that Google has a monopoly on advertisements that appear in search results. The Ministry argued that Google artificially inflated the prices of advertising above what it would cost on the free market.
In his decision, Mehta agreed that «Google used its monopoly power by setting supra-competitive prices for general search text ads. This behavior allowed Google to generate monopoly profits for». However, the judge added that Google does not have monopoly power in the broad search advertising market.
At the same time, Mehta refused to impose sanctions on Google for failing to preserve the chat messages of employees that may have been relevant to the case. The decision states that since 2008, Google has been deleting chat messages between its employees after 24 hours as a standard practice.
So far, Judge Amit Mehta has not imposed any remedies on Google. The judge may order Google to change the way it operates or even sell part of its business.
Source: Engadget