A judge ruled that Google has been unlawfully exploiting its dominance over competing companies Monday by stifling innovation in an effort to maintain dominance over the search engine industry. The lawsuit wrapped up nearly a year after the trial between the US Justice Department and Google first began.
US District Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued the decision after reviewing a year’s worth of evidence including testimonies from top executives at Google, Microsoft and Apple. Google and the DOJ presented their closing arguments in early May, AP reported.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling. The company paid billions of dollars a year to device makers like Apple and Samsung to have Google installed as the default search engine on those devices.
The ruling is perhaps the biggest antitrust decision of the modern internet era and could fundamentally alter how consumers use the internet. It could also hint at how other antitrust suits will play out against tech giants like Amazon, Apple, and Meta*, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The US battled Microsoft in a similar antitrust suit during the 1990s.
“This is the most important antitrust case of the century, and it’s the first of a big slate of cases to come down against Big Tech,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s law school. “It’s a huge turning point.”
Google is well known for its search engine – so much so that the name of the company has become synonymous for the act of online search. Google’s search engine handles about 8.5 billion searches per day across the world which is nearly double that of 12 years ago. The result of the suit will undoubtedly present a major blow to Google which generated nearly $240 billion in revenue last year.
Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said the company intends to appeal the ruling. The company also faces a separate federal antitrust case over ad technology that will go to trial next month.
Meanwhile the Consumer Choice Center, a lobbying group, has accused the US of “drifting toward the anti-tech posture of the European Union, a part of the world that makes almost nothing and penalizes successful American companies for their popularity.”
*Facebook/Meta is banned in Russia for extremism