Legal Defeat for Tech Giant – Winnipeg Free Press

Opinion

This was big news at Google for a number of reasons.

If you had typed “Google antitrust” into a search engine yesterday, you would have found a ton of articles about Google violating U.S. antitrust law.

Now, interestingly, none of this news was actually produced by Google itself, but Google did make advertising money off of all the content it simply indexed. (Almost hilariously, the lead Associated Press article on this topic was topped off with an ad for Google services.)

So it’s odd that even bad news about Google is good for its bottom line. And this editorial — if someone finds it online using a search engine — will do the same. Sigh.

But let’s get back to the heart of the matter: U.S. antitrust law aims to combat what the U.S. Department of Justice calls “unfair business practices that may harm consumers.”

In the long-running case, which was brought in the US, the judge found that Google not only had a lock on the internet search industry, but that it was abusing its monopoly position to keep other players out of the market. Its huge market share in the search industry – more than 89 percent of all internet searches are done on Google – meant that it was able to artificially inflate the prices it charged advertisers while not having to improve the service it offered customers.

For advertisers and customers alike, this meant they were being offered a “this or nothing” deal with no other real options if they decided to leave the Google universe.

A key part of the judge’s findings centered around the huge amounts of money Google paid to ensure that smartphones and other devices came with Google Search as their default setting from the start. In total, Google paid more than $23 billion in 2021 ($20 billion for Apple alone in 2022) to make sure new tech buyers saw and used Google first.

In its defense, Google argued that it was simply the best search engine—and that if there were a better choice, customers would choose the better search engine. That might be true—if a customer actually saw a new search engine. Which may be why the judge in this case focused particularly on payments to technology manufacturers, to make sure that Google was the first and most obvious choice.

The logic is clear: If you pay retailers to exclusively sell your particular mouse trap, it will be difficult for a new mouse trap manufacturer to get its product to customers, even if that trap is more effective at catching mice.

The bright spot? Perhaps the fact that, as U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has stated, “No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law.”