(Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Google created an illegal “monopoly” by paying partners to make its search engine the default on today’s smartphones and mobile browsers, a federal judge ruled today.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act,” wrote Judge Amit Mehta in a 277-page ruling.
At issue is a 2020 antitrust lawsuit the Justice Department filed against Google for allegedly locking up the search market through billion-dollar partnership deals with device makers, including Apple and Samsung.
Following years of litigation, the judge sided with federal prosecutors, and ruled that Google has “monopoly powers” in the general search market and over search ads. In addition, the judge found that ”Google’s distribution agreements are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects,” including artificially inflating the prices for ads that appear in Google Search.
“That conduct has allowed Google to earn monopoly profits,” Mehta added. Still, his verdict offered no remedy to undo the monopolization. Instead, the Justice Department and Google agreed to “to bifurcate the liability and remedies phases,” the judge noted in his ruling.
Google told PCMag it plans on appealing the case. "This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available," said Google President for Global Affairs Kent Walker.
He also hit back by taking snippets from Mehta's ruling that seemingly undercut his decision about Google's position as a monopoly.
"We appreciate the Court’s finding that Google is 'the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users,' that Google 'has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices,' 'has continued to innovate in search,' and that 'Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior,'" Walker wrote.
In the meantime, Google critics are hailing the ruling as a win for reining in the company’s reach.
“Finally, our regulators and courts are holding Google to account for years of antitrust violations that have enabled the company to amass near-total control over the ways in which we share reliable news and information,” said the Open Markets Institute, a nonprofit devoted to stopping tech monopolies.