New York
CNN
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Google violated US antitrust law with its search business, a federal judge ruled on Monday, handing the tech giant a stunning court victory with the chance to change the way millions of Americans access information online and promote decades of rule.
“After careful consideration of the evidence and testimony of the witnesses, the court reached the following conclusion: Google is a tyrant, and it acts as one to maintain its dominance,” US District Judge Amit Mehta Mehta said. wrote in Monday’s comments. “Violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
The decision by the US District Court for the District of Columbia is a stunning rebuke of Google’s oldest and most valuable business. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars on exclusive contracts to gain the upper hand as the world’s default search provider for smartphones and web browsers.
Those deals gave potential rivals such as Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo a leg up, the US government alleges in a historic antitrust lawsuit filed during the Trump administration.
Now, said Mehta, that strong position has led to anti-competitive behavior that must be stopped.
In particular, Google’s exclusive partnerships with Apple and other key players in the mobile ecosystem were anti-competitive, Mehta said. Google also charged higher prices for search ads that reflected its search power, he added.
Those agreements have long meant that when users want to find information, Google is often the easiest and fastest platform to go to, which has led to Google’s massive online advertising business. .
Although the court did not find that Google has a monopoly on search advertising, the broad opinion represents the first major decision in a series of competition cases led by the US government that have targeted Big Tech. This case in particular has been described as the biggest antitrust technology case since the US government’s fight with Microsoft at the beginning of the millennium.
Neither Google nor the Justice Department immediately responded to a request for comment. The case is separate from a separate antitrust suit brought by the Biden administration against Google in 2023 related to the company’s marketing technology business. That case is expected to go to trial in early September.
But Monday’s decision marks the second high-profile antitrust attack for Google after a California jury said in December that Google had an illegal monopoly on its app store. The court in the case is discussing possible solutions.
Mehta’s decision is expected to start a separate process to determine what sanctions Google will face – and the company is likely to appeal. But the decision could ultimately upend the way Google makes its search engine available to users, by affecting its ability to strike expensive deals with device makers and Internet service providers. which were at the heart of the case.
If the court revokes Google’s agreements that make it the default search engine on so many devices, it could damage the company’s core product at a critical time, Emarketer senior analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf said in a statement. – email.
“Its ubiquity is its biggest strength, especially as competition rises among other AI-driven search engines,” Mitchell-Wolf said, referring to the growing threat. of Google search controls powered by artificial intelligence search tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
When the case began, US antitrust officials also did not rule out the possibility of Google’s breakup, warning that Google’s behavior could threaten future innovation or the rise of Google’s successor.
The decision could also be a bellwether for other major tech antitrust cases currently in court, including against Apple and Amazon. Amazon and Apple have called the antitrust lawsuits filed against them “wrong on both the facts and the law.”
This is an ongoing story and will be updated.
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