Even those of us who search Google every day—and that’s the vast majority of us—can and should applaud this week’s article. Federal Court decision The judge found that the company maintained its dominant position in Internet search through an illegal monopoly. Google Search can be both a very, very useful product (indeed, the judge said it is “widely recognized as the best” general search engine “available in the United States”) and a product that might not remain at the top of the digital rankings if it did not compete with competitors.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., is based on the fact that Google spends billions of dollars to make its search engine the default on new smartphones and other devices. In one recent year alone, those deals cost the company $26 billion, far more than most of its competitors can afford.
While users do have the choice to go into their settings and change the default search engine to Bing (7% market share in the US) or DuckDuckGo (2% market share), Google, with 90% market share overall and even more on mobile, knows that it’s a big deal to be the automatic choice for millions of people. If it weren’t, they wouldn’t be paying such a large sum.
When users trust Google reflexively, every click that follows further reinforces Google’s dominance in advertising (which the judge said in this case enables monopolistic pricing) and a wide range of other areas. That’s the key to making money online.
The court-ordered solution remains to be determined; the legal process to achieve it will begin next month. It could involve sanctions or structural changes that would weaken the company’s ability to set Google as its default brand, or even prevent it from doing so altogether.
It also remains to be seen whether the decision and the appeals will stand once the logic of the decision is subject to review by higher courts. There will be appeals — Google has a very well-funded legal department, as do the U.S. Justice Department and the state attorneys general who brought the case. Both are bracing for a lengthy trial.
Internet search engines have already started to fall on hard times. A new generation of AI-powered tools, including Perplexity AI, OpenAI’s SearchGPT, and Bing, are competing with Google’s new AI-powered search to do more than just provide a list of results for queries.
These programs take an ever-larger and more confusing Internet and distill it so that users can get more and more of what they need without leaving the page where they typed their query. This will eventually give Google, or whatever youngster manages to oppose it, even more power and money-making ability than before.
We hope the decision stands up to scrutiny in higher courts. Consumers should be completely free to choose Google if they prefer, and we think many will likely do so, at least in the short term. After all, the word Google has become a category-defining brand name, like Xerox or Kleenex. But the decision needs to be made at a high level, not with one of the biggest names on the web putting its big thumb on the scale.
