Google is now 0 for 2 in a U.S. District Judge’s Court of Unlawful Competition and the Discovery of a Higher-Order Google Search
Google is now 0 for 2 in antitrust trials. United States District judge Amit Mehta ruled on Monday that Google has unlawfully maintained its dominance in search by using anticompetitive deals to keep rivals from gaining traction. And without fear of pressure from competitors, Google has been able to charge whatever it wants for search ads, he said.
The size of the payments that were made to Apple by Google was the biggest revelation from the case. An expert witness for Google let slip that the company shares 36 percent of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple. Apple received $20 billion from Google for the default position in 2022, according to Apple.
United States Attorney General Merrick Garland called the decision “an historic win.” Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter said it “paves the path for innovation for generations to come.”
The ways in which the judgment in San Francisco and Washington will affect the company’s business are not yet known. Mehta will conduct a trial to determine remedies for the search case, while a judge is considering proposed penalties in the Play litigation. In response to antitrust scrutiny, some changes made by Google have been costly.
Mehta ruled that Google, with about 90 percent market share, has monopoly power in both general search and general search text ads. He found that Google’s deals with partners harm competition and that Google hadn’t shown otherwise.