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What now for Google?
The federal court ruling that Google had abused its monopoly in online search threatens to disrupt one of the most valuable businesses in modern history, and Big Tech more broadly.
Expect Google to fight back, which could drag this out for some time. Still, the decision will likely carry a lot of consequences for the internet industry.
What happened: Judge Amit Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with the Justice Department and several states that had accused Google of illegally cementing its search dominance. In large part that was by paying billions each year to companies including Apple and Samsung to make Google the default search engine on their devices. (Apple alone received $20 billion in 2022.)
Those agreements hurt competition, Mehta found, allowing Google to trample competitors. That dominance — 94.9 percent of the general search market — then allowed the company to inflate the prices for some search ads, giving it more money to pay Apple and others, he wrote.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of search to Google’s business: The operation represented more than half of the company’s $74.6 billion in total revenue for the second quarter.
What comes next? Mehta, a President Obama appointee, set a hearing for Sept. 6 to begin discussing potential remedies. The big question is whether the government will push for divestitures (a structural remedy, in antitrust parlance) or some form of operational fix.
