Breaking: Federal court rules that Google violated US antitrust law with its search business

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Google loses massive antitrust lawsuit over its search dominance | CNN Business

WWW.CNN.COM

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Google has violated US antitrust law with its search business, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing the tech giant a staggering court defeat with the potential to reshape how millions of Americans get information online and to upend decades of dominance.

 

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Google has violated US antitrust law with its search business, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing the tech giant a staggering court defeat with the potential to reshape how millions of Americans get information online and to upend decades of dominance.

 

The decision by the US District Court for the District of Columbia is a stunning rebuke of Google’s oldest and most important business. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars on exclusive contracts to secure a dominant position as the world’s default search provider on smartphones and web browsers.

 

Those contracts have given it the scale to block out would-be rivals such as Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo, the US government alleged in a historic antitrust lawsuit filed during the Trump administration.

 

Now, said US District Judge Amit Mehta, that powerful position has led to anticompetitive behavior that must be stopped.

 

“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 Monday’s opinion. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

 

 

[Bacon]

[GeneticBlueprint]

[CitizenVectron]

Good. What are the potential consequences? If it's just a bunch of fines, then nothing will change.

[Keyser_Soze]

Time for Metacrawler to make a comeback.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

9 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

Good. What are the potential consequences? 

 

No idea - this ruling only determines "liability", not "remedies".

[Spork3245]

It's time for his return...

[SuperSpreader]

I'm Excite-ted

[TwinIon]

35 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

Good. What are the potential consequences? If it's just a bunch of fines, then nothing will change.

I'll have more thoughts once I get a chance to read through some of the ruling, but based on quick impressions from news articles, I think the most obvious one would be that Google couldn't keep paying everyone to be the default search engine. That could go a few different ways depending on the product and depending on how Microsoft and Open AI approach things. Apple might keep Google as the default because it's probably still the best user experience and no one else is likely to pay anything close to what Google was. For products like Firefox that rely on that Google money, they'll probably take the highest bid they can. Other products might just move to a ballot system.

 

It will also depend very much on how much Open AI and MS are willing to spend since I doubt DuckDuckGo or Kagi will be putting up big bucks on major deals. MS might see this as an opportunity to make Bing a real player and put some real money behind it for the first time ever. If they did spend the money to be the default search provider on iPhones or Samsung phones, that could be a big deal. On the other hand, they don't want to spend a $50B to be a default that everyone changes back to google. Open AI has show a willingness to spend a ton of money, but even while they have a search product coming, they don't seem to have any kind of ad product, so they're probably not ready to start spending a ton of money getting their search everywhere before it can actually bring in revenue.

 

There is almost certainly some aspect of Google preferring its own search across products, so some internal stuff could shift.

 

Since the court didn't find a monopoly in search advertising, it's doesn't seem like Google will be getting broken up or anything that severe.

 

[sblfilms]

It’s been a while since I looked at their financials, but spinning off the ad business of Google by itself would potentially solve most of the more egregious anti-trust issues at Alphabet. This is because driving ad revenue, the money printing engine of the whole outfit, is what leads the company to do all sorts of shady nonsense.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

3 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

It’s been a while since I looked at their financials, but spinning off the ad business of Google by itself would potentially solve most of the more egregious anti-trust issues at Alphabet. This is because driving ad revenue, the money printing engine of the whole outfit, is what leads the company to do all sorts of shady nonsense.

 

In its 2Q 2024 financials, "Google Search & Other" accounted for 57% of its total overall revenue.

[Ghost_MH]

36 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

I'll have more thoughts once I get a chance to read through some of the ruling, but based on quick impressions from news articles, I think the most obvious one would be that Google couldn't keep paying everyone to be the default search engine. That could go a few different ways depending on the product and depending on how Microsoft and Open AI approach things. Apple might keep Google as the default because it's probably still the best user experience and no one else is likely to pay anything close to what Google was. For products like Firefox that rely on that Google money, they'll probably take the highest bid they can. Other products might just move to a ballot system.

 

It will also depend very much on how much Open AI and MS are willing to spend since I doubt DuckDuckGo or Kagi will be putting up big bucks on major deals. MS might see this as an opportunity to make Bing a real player and put some real money behind it for the first time ever. If they did spend the money to be the default search provider on iPhones or Samsung phones, that could be a big deal. On the other hand, they don't want to spend a $50B to be a default that everyone changes back to google. Open AI has show a willingness to spend a ton of money, but even while they have a search product coming, they don't seem to have any kind of ad product, so they're probably not ready to start spending a ton of money getting their search everywhere before it can actually bring in revenue.

 

There is almost certainly some aspect of Google preferring its own search across products, so some internal stuff could shift.

 

Since the court didn't find a monopoly in search advertising, it's doesn't seem like Google will be getting broken up or anything that severe.

 

 

I'm trying to figure out how to remedy this and I'm coming up blank. It's pretty clear that Google used their position to bully competition out of the market. The issue then is nobody makes as much money on search as Google does, so I'm not even sure what the market for sponsored search looks like without Google. They're only willing to spend to buy competition out of those spaces because they make so much money. Without that money, Microsoft is in now a bidding war with...DuckDuckGo?

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

As posted on ResetERA by someone who genuinely appears to be antitrust specialist (their coverage of the ABK/MSFT acquisition was magnificent!):

 

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Right now, every big company in the US is wondering if all the exclusive distribution agreements that they have signed in recent years are legal or not

 

[sblfilms]

49 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

In its 2Q 2024 financials, "Google Search & Other" accounted for 57% of its total overall revenue.

Thanks. From what I recall, it is even crazier when you look at the margins on that revenue compared to everything else the make money on.

[TwinIon]

1 hour ago, Ghost_MH said:

I'm trying to figure out how to remedy this and I'm coming up blank. It's pretty clear that Google used their position to bully competition out of the market. The issue then is nobody makes as much money on search as Google does, so I'm not even sure what the market for sponsored search looks like without Google. They're only willing to spend to buy competition out of those spaces because they make so much money. Without that money, Microsoft is in now a bidding war with...DuckDuckGo?

Yeah, if Google is spending $26B a year (as of 2021) to be the default everywhere, I doubt MS will pick up that slack. Bing only brings in something like $12B in total revenue, not profit. Perplexity is a start up, Open AI's search product could be a big deal, but they're a long way from making money. DuckDuckGo only brings in $100M in revenue, no one else seems worth mentioning.

 

It'd would be kind of a hilarious outcome if the result of all this is that Google saves $30B a year from these deals, pay a fine, and their market share doesn't change at all.