What will happen now that the internet company is a monopolist?
Google vs Google in a US Tech Monopole Case: The First Court Decision of a High-Dimensional Government Superjudgment
The decision is the first in a wave of tech monopoly cases brought by the US government in recent years. While two decades passed between the Department of Justices’ antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft and its next tech anti-monopoly case against Google, filed in 2020, several more such cases quickly followed. Amazon, Apple, and Meta all now face their own monopolization lawsuits from the US government, and Google will go to trial against the DOJ a second time this fall over a separate challenge of its advertising technology business. That makes Mehta’s decision in this case even more consequential for how other judges may consider how to apply century-old antitrust laws to modern digital markets.
The most detailed examination of its business has been performed by him and his findings reveal a business which has grown to $175 billion in annual revenue. Google will appeal, as it risks losing its prominent placement on iPhones and other gateways to the web.
United States Attorney General Garland called the decision an historic win. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter said it “paves the path for innovation for generations to come.”
The judgments in San Francisco and Washington will have an effect on the way in which GOOGLE does business. Mehta will hold a separate trial to determine remedies in the search case, and a judge is mulling proposed penalties in the Play litigation. But some changes Google has made in response to antitrust scrutiny in recent years have been costly.
Mehta ruled that a company with 90 percent of the market share has monopoly power in both general search and text ads. He found that competition was harmed by the deals with partners.
Google and the plaintiffs will spar over how severe its penalty should be, presenting experts and written testimony before Mehta issues another opinion and order. The exact timeline is unclear, though. William Kovacic, a former Federal Trade Commission chair and a professor at George Washington University, tells The Verge that he expects Judge Amit Mehta to hold a roughly weeklong hearing on remedies this year and believes the overall process could stretch to the end of 2024.
A fight that takes up to a year is what Rebecca Allensworth thinks will happen. “There’s going to be gnashing of teeth over the remedy, and that is going to make it take a long time,” Allensworth says.
A milder remedy, which Kovacic finds most likely, is an injunction that “directs Google to cease the conduct that the court found to be improper.” But even that includes changes that could range from trivial to seismic. Mehta could demand Google modify its multibillion-dollar deals with companies like Apple and Mozilla, for instance, which cement it as the default search engine on products like the iPhone.
The Supreme Court isn’t going to make a decision until the end of the year, according to Kovacic, a Cornell University law professor
The Supreme Court could make a decision by the end of the year according to Kovacic. George Hay, a Cornell University law professor, gave The Associated Press a five year time line.
