Federal Court Rules Against Google’s Illegal Monopoly on Search Engine
Federal Court Rules Against Google’s Illegal Monopoly on Search Engine
Staff Writer
Kaila Engle
On Monday, September 9, 2024, in Alexandria, Virginia, Google went to trial with federal prosecutors for the second time on anti-trust charges. During the first trial in August, the court ruled that Google violated Section Two of the Sherman Act– which prohibits actions that prevent trade competition, and focus on outlawing conspiracy and monopolization. reports that the issue was that Google’s search engine was exploiting its power to eliminate competition and promote its own services. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta saw these tendencies in addition to evidence provided at trial to be sufficient evidence to rule that Google is a monopoly.
The Associated Press reports that in response to this initial verdict, Kent Walker, Google’s President of Global Affairs, has said that Google will appeal this decision because “this decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.” In late September, Mehta is set to release a timeline for working out competition remedies for Google, that will be decided by next August.
The focus of the second case taking place is Google’s domination of the online ad sales market, and the outcome of this case has the potential to redefine the industry of online sales. The Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that Google is up-charging it’s cost for ad sales. The Guardian reports that in this process Google is “keeping at least 30 cents of every dollar that flows to website publishers through its advertising technology,” resulting in the accumulation of billions of dollars in revenue. Reuters confirms that Google has dominated “the technological infrastructure that funds the flow of news and information on websites through more than 150,000 online ad sales every second.” More specifically, the issue lies with their use of the Google Ad Manager Software, which allows websites around the globe to engage in digital auctions through the software to buy spots on websites to sell their ads. The New York Times highlights the government’s comments that “Google’s technology for selling ads across the web brought in about $31.7 billion in 2021” and “today, Google’s ad-selling tools for publishers control 87 percent of the U.S. market.” The DOJ plans to bring in YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and Jerry Dischler, former vice president of Google’s ad platform who currently leads the company’s cloud applications in for testimony.
U.S. News shared comments by Julia Tarver Wood, a DOJ attorney claiming that “Google is not here because they are big, they are here because they used that size to crush competition.” The trial will unfold within the next few weeks, but with current precedent not in their favor, the power of Google’s dominance in the ad industry may fall apart. Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, has commented on the current case against them, and claimed to New York Times reporters that “with the cost of ads going down and the number of ads sold going up, the market is working,” and “the DOJ’s case risks inefficiencies and higher prices — the last thing that America’s economy or our small businesses need right now.” This brings up an interesting point in this debate if the current economy is able to handle a breakdown of Google’s dominance and possible ensuing insufficiencies. In response, to the DOJ’s claims, the New York Times reports that Google and its representatives say that the company’s success in dominating the online sales market is because it works and is the best platform out there, and their work is not an antitrust violation and the justice department is not correctly defining the digital ad market.
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