Highlights from the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust search ruling against Google

Editor’s note: The U.S. Department of Justice issued a landmark decision on August 5, declaring Google a monopoly in both the general search engine services market and the general text search ads market. As the industry awaits the next steps, including a decision on how Google can improve its conduct, an article in CM AdExchanger’s sister publication examines several key points from U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta’s 286-page ruling that form the basis of his arguments—from default distribution agreements with device manufacturers to unencumbered price increases. Here’s a sample article; go to AdExchanger to read the full article.

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Dollar bills, y’all

Judge Mehta spent a lot of time in his ruling on the issue of Google’s default distribution agreements with device manufacturers including Apple and Samsung – and he had reason to do so.

Judge Mehta writes that being the default “constitutes incredibly valuable real estate” because “many users simply stick with searching with the default settings, and Google receives billions of queries every day through these access points.”

Billions of searches translate into “extraordinary amounts of user data,” which in turn translates into billions of dollars in advertising revenue.

From the judgment: “More users means more advertisers, and more advertisers means more revenue. As Google’s searches have grown, so has the amount of advertising dollars it earns. In 2014, Google booked nearly $47 billion in ad revenue. By 2021, that number had more than tripled to more than $146 billion. Bing, by comparison, generated just a fraction of that — less than $12 billion in 2022.”

The full article and key excerpts from the document can be read on the AdExchanger website.