The Ruling Comports with the Facts

A judge has ruled that Google is a monopoly, and that it has used this fact to sustain that monopoly, which is a black letter law violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. 

Today is a big day for American business.

"After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence,” wrote Judge Amit Mehta in his decision of the case United States of America vs Google LLC, “the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act."

Fifteen years after it was first investigated, search giant Google is finally going to be held accountable for unfairly thwarting competition. In this piece, I’m going to discuss the complaint against Google, why it lost, the next steps, and what this case means for American business going forward.

Make no mistake, this decision is huge for Google, the web, and the revival of monopolization law against giants across the economy. It’s also a big deal for the BIG community. We’ve been writing about this case, covering antitrust law, filing comments, contacting policymakers and pushing for aggressive enforcement for almost five years. Subscribers to BIG helped finance the special site Big Tech on Trial, where we hired a reporter to cover the case and helped ensure that the judge didn’t keep key evidence behind closed doors.

So this victory is not just for the public, it is in a sense by the public.

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The government’s case against Google was simple. The search giant pays tens of billions of dollars a year to companies that distribute search engines - Apple, LG, Motorola, Samsung, AT&T, T-Mobile, Mozilla, Opera, UCWeb, and Verizon - to make sure it was the only search engine consumers saw. A colleague described the case in 2020:

The government is saying that Google put its search engine in front of consumers so rivals – like Bing or DuckDuckGo – never get a chance to compete. The most important way to distribute search engines is to be the preset default general search engine on a device; most consumers simply never change their defaults. To take advantage of this dynamic, Google has agreements with mobile phone companies like Apple and Samsung, wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon, and browser companies like Mozilla to gain default status for Google.

In other words, it bought up all the shelf space. Such a tactic, a monopolist paying off partners to prevent distribution of a rival, is called “monopoly maintenance.”

At the core of the ruling is that Google's behavior met even the hypocritical and ahistorical standards of Robert Bork's antitrust "Scholarship," in that it caused damage to the consumer, because Google felt free to proceed with the enshittification of their search engine: 

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The company’s own research revealed its overbroad influence, too, Mehta noted. “In 2020, Google conducted a quality degradation study, which showed that it would not lose search revenue if [it] were to significantly reduce the quality of its search product,” he wrote. A company that knows it can make its product worse “without concern of losing consumers,” he added, is “proof of monopoly power.”

In rather ironically timed news, Google has cut an exclusive deal with Reddit for its search engine.

Given that people have taken to adding "Reddit" to Google searches in order to compensate for the degradation of their search engine, it ain't just the timing that is ironic.

In this case though, I am more inclined to blame Reddit than Google, but as an monopolist, you cannot accept a pay for play deal that entrenches your monopoly.  

It also further entrenches the enshittification of Google search, which is a cost to consumers, and hence meets even Bork's insanely high bar:

Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine.

If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward. Searching for Reddit still works on Kagi, an independent, paid search engine that buys part of its search index from Google.

The news shows how Google’s near monopoly on search is now actively hindering other companies’ ability to compete at a time when Google is facing increasing criticism over the quality of its search results. This exclusion of other search engines also comes after Reddit locked down access to its site to stop companies from scraping it for AI training data, which at the moment only Google can do as a result of a multi-million dollar deal that gives Google the right to scrape Reddit for data to train its AI products.

Yeah, right.  It's all about AI.

I believe you.

While I do not give a flying f%$# in a rolling doughnut about AI, I do think that this deal, in addition to antitrust issues, is a blow to what little remains of the open web.

In the long run, I think that the looting of user generated data by Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman will result in the death of the site and by its replacement, said CEO will still be getting 9 figure paychecks, so he does not care about that.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On a more personal note, it is likely that this antitrust ruling will be the death of Mozilla, and possibly the death of the Firefox browser that I currently use, because Google contributions to the Mozilla.org will likely be curtailed, as they were a (now failed) ploy to avoid antitrust scrutiny:

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”

With those words from United States District judge Amit Mehta on Monday, Google suffered a historic antitrust case loss at the hands of the U.S. Department of Justice. Mehta, the judge presiding over the trial, ruled that the tech giant has illegally maintained a monopoly through the billions of dollars in annual payments it makes to partners to secure the default search engine position on popular web browsers and mobile phones. With those dominant positions locked in, the argument goes, other competitors in the search and search advertising businesses have no chance of competing effectively.

The ruling immediately prompted speculation about the impact to Apple, which receives as much as $20 billion from Google every year in exchange for putting the search engine front and center on its iPhones via the Apple Safari web browser.

But while Apple would certainly take a big hit if the ruling is upheld, Apple is a large, diversified company with many sources of revenue. That’s not the case for another partner of Google’s located in the fallout zone of Monday’s ruling: Mozilla, the nonprofit tech org that makes the Firefox web browser.

hen users of Firefox type a search term into the browser, the query is automatically routed to Google’s search engine. The arrangement is vital for Mozilla. According to the Mozilla Foundation’s 2021–2022 financial statement, which is the most recent one published, $510 million out of its $593 million in revenue came courtesy of Google’s search payments.

If that $510 million were to go away entirely, Mozilla would have a serious problem on its hands.

I would note that the CEO of Mozilla.org was paid nearly  $8 million in 2022, so perhaps, just perhaps, there is a little bit of cost cutting that could be done to account for this, but it won't happen, because, "America, Hell Yeah!"

Maybe it's time to fork the code, and bring back JWZ.