Google is not a monopoly. It is widely used because it is the best | Opinion

A federal judge ruled Monday that Google violated antitrust law and acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on online search. There’s just one glaring problem: Google isn’t a monopoly — not even close.

In fact, there are over 30 other search engines in the world that are dedicated solely to search functions, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Duck, Duck, Go. Additionally, sites like Amazon, TikTok, and Pinterest have given Google increasing competition in recent years as consumers have begun using these sites for all sorts of searches, from products to DIY tutorials to medical advice.

This ruling represents the first antitrust decision in the modern technology era, and its implications could have far-reaching consequences for our legal system, our economy and consumers.

In that case, the U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google had acted in an anticompetitive manner by entering into agreements with companies like Apple and Samsung that ensured that their browsers were automatically downloaded to their devices. They also argued that more than 90 percent of web searches were conducted on Google search engines.

In fact, consumers have always had the option to download their preferred search engines to their phones or remove apps that come pre-programmed on their devices. By securing these offerings, Google hasn’t blocked access to other search engines or forced anyone to use its products. It’s simply made them more convenient to access, which is a perfectly reasonable move for the company.

Google disputes the claim that 90 percent of web searches are done through its search engines. But even if that were the case, the company’s popularity indicates one thing, and one thing only: Consumers like Google’s products and want to use them. The company has not wronged consumers in any way, defrauded anyone, or even acted unfairly against its competitors. Being smart enough to negotiate such deals simply makes Google better at its job.

For decades, antitrust law has been based on a conservative legal jurisprudence known as the consumer welfare standard. This is a very good legal precedent that advocates of capitalism and limited government worked hard to put into law after the disastrous period of aggressive antitrust by the U.S. government in the 20th century that crippled our economy.

The consumer welfare standard says that to violate antitrust law, three conditions must be met. The company in question must be a monopoly (exceptionally rare), it must exploit its monopoly power, and it must do so in a way that harms consumers. No serious person could argue that Google crossed any of these lines, much less all three.

But the case against Google is just one of many the government has brought in recent years, many of them coming from the FTC under the aggressively anti-capitalist stewardship of Chairwoman Lina Khan. Khan’s agenda, which has been championed by the Biden administration and populists from both parties like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, aims to overturn the consumer welfare standard and return our antitrust landscape to the state it was in the mid-1900s. According to these types, being a big company means it’s bad, not the obvious truth that being a big company merely means it’s popular and offers a product or service that consumers are very familiar with. And their solution to “bad” big business is always the same: government needs more control over the economy and private companies to “protect” consumers from these evil corporations.

But the antitrust enthusiasts always play their cards, exposing antitrust as a Trojan horse: The same people who openly hate capitalism always claim that we need more of it to “save” capitalism. But capitalism does not need saving from government, certainly not from monopolies. In a truly free market, system failures occur naturally and quickly, as better competitors emerge, products become obsolete, or growth takes over. Monopolies rarely exist at all, and they never last long under capitalism.

Despite the fact that our economy is now more diverse than the free market, antitrust advocates still have difficulty identifying actual monopolies. In fact, the only long-term monopolies that come to mind are those created or supported by government (think of the public school system or certificate of need laws that block the entry of new health care providers).

Google lost the lawsuit, but the real losers are Americans. This decision not only could prevent Google from offering the high-quality products that millions of us enjoy, but it also means it will be even harder for another competitor to get a foot in the door.

Hannah Cox is the CEO and co-founder of BASEDPolitics. She works at Netchoice, a free-market trade organization for the technology industry.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author.