A judge has ruled that Google’s search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to quash competition and stifle innovation in a decision that could shake up the internet.
US district judge Amit Mehta’s ruling came nearly a year after the start of a trial pitting America’s Justice Department against the tech giant in the country’s biggest anti-trust showdown for a quarter of a century.
After reviewing evidence that included testimony from senior executives at Google, Microsoft and Apple during last year’s 10-week trial, Judge Mehta said: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
Google “enjoys an 89.2 per cent share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9 per cent on mobile devices”, the 277-page ruling said.
It represents a major setback for Google and its parent, Alphabet, which had argued that its popularity stemmed from consumers’ overwhelming desire to use a search engine so good that it has become synonymous with looking for information online. It is likely to appeal against the ruling in a process that could go to the Supreme Court. The case depicted Google as a technological bully that has methodically thwarted competition to protect a search engine that has become the centrepiece of a digital advertising machine that generated £188 billion in revenue last year.
Justice Department lawyers argued that Google’s monopoly enabled it to charge advertisers artificially high prices while enjoying the luxury of having more time and money to invest in improving the quality of its search engine — a lax approach that affected consumers.
Google ridiculed the allegations noting that consumers have historically changed search engines when they became disillusioned with the results they were getting. For instance, Yahoo — now a minor player — was the most popular search engine in the Nineties.
Judge Mehta’s conclusion that Google has been running an illegal monopoly sets up another legal phase to determine what sort of changes or penalties should be imposed.
