Google’s rise was inevitable. As was its antitrust ruling

Larry Page and Sergey Brin have never enjoyed being around reporters. “Larry may be a very sensitive and kind person, but he has serious trust issues and very little social manners,” a former Google PR employee once told me. “Sergey has social manners, but he doesn’t trust people he doesn’t think are close to his intelligence.”

Still, in the fall of 1999, their new communications manager urged the Google cofounders to visit the East Coast for a modest press tour. Google, barely a year old, was still flying under most people’s radar, and few knew its fascinating story: Page had put the entire World Wide Web on Stanford University servers to figure out the perfect result for a search query, and Brin had done some math to pull it off. They tried to sell the technology to a major Web site but couldn’t get a deal they liked. So they started their own company. It was still unclear where their revenue would come from. They were known to hate advertising, believing that “ad-funded search engines would be inherently biased toward advertisers rather than consumers.”

When they arrived at Newsweek, where I was then working, none of the top editors wanted to meet with them; Web search seemed like a niche feature of Yahoo, AOL, and the other dominant portals. So the business editor and I took them to lunch at a downtown seafood restaurant. The size and hustle and bustle of New York seemed overwhelming for the awkward pair. The idea that their company might one day be worth $2 trillion seemed as plausible as the Earth spinning on its axis.

Fast-forward a quarter of a century. Google—now called Alphabet—is indeed worth many trillions. Internet searches are ingrained in our lives, as common as breathing—and Google has 90 percent of the global market. Larry and Sergey, though still shareholders with assets of more than $100 billion each, are no longer employees or board members. And this week, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta issued a 286-page ruling, based on millions of documents, thousands of exhibits, and a nine-week trial, that Google violated antitrust law. “Google,” he wrote, “is a monopoly and has acted like one to maintain its monopoly.” What’s more, the company whose founders hated advertising now faces another lawsuit to determine whether it also has a monopoly on digital advertising.

While it was hard to imagine in 1999, Google’s rise from upstart to overlord now seems obvious. Dominance, even to the point of monopoly, has proven to be the inevitable goal for winners in the era of dot-com scale. The digital economy creates winner-take-all competition, where early innovators with humble beginnings can outcompete entrenched technology leaders who will soon be displaced. Every company at the top of our current tech mountain was founded by eager young people with a big idea, usually an idea that was rejected by the industry giants of the day. Before Larry and Sergey, there was Bill Gates and Paul Allen, two college kids who saw a market for computer software; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, building Apple II computers in their garage; Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon on a shoestring budget to sell stuff on the Internet. A few years after Google was founded, Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook in his dorm room. The technology companies that fought for leadership had a similar story: David versus Goliath.

But these slingshots were special. The network effects of the persistent and ubiquitous Internet accelerate and lock down category leaders. What’s more, these founders were brutal competitors who exploited those advantages to the max. Larry Page was haunted by the story of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant inventor who died in obscurity, vowing not to become Tesla. Microsoft’s use of bundling to stifle competitors was notorious (and led to an antitrust lawsuit it lost). Jeff Bezos protected his flanks with Napoleonic zeal, keeping customers close by with low prices. A young Mark Zuckerberg would end meetings by shouting “Dominance!” Eventually, as Davids became Goliaths, they fit into a new narrative: the Icarus myth. Fueled by the hubris of their dominance—and confusing their network-effects-fueled growth with their own unique geniuses—their ascents took them perilously close to the sun.

That is the context of Judge Mehta’s ruling. Specifically, it focuses on Google’s practice of spending tens of billions of dollars combined to default to Apple and Mozilla browsers. Google insisted that it could enter into such agreements only because its search engine was the best alternative: Apple would never impose an inferior product on its customers. But the judge noted that Google’s superiority was self-perpetuating. Because Google handles almost all searches, it can gather data on a scale that its competitors cannot hope to match. That allows it to improve its search engine in ways that its rivals cannot. It is legal to gain a monopoly through a better product or innovation, but it is legal to do so by maintain monopoly, as well as restricting competition, are illegal. So, says the judge, Google is breaking the law.