For years, Google has been synonymous with its main search product. Generations have grown up relying on the company’s flagship service to search the web, answer questions, and cheat on exams prepared by innocent, hard-working professors.
But now all this has been called into question, as this month Google was formally adjudicated to have been running a monopoly in search. What does that mean? Doesn’t Google have competitors, after all? And what will happen to the company, and the enormous part of the online experience it shapes for billions of users?
The decision, the result in part of the Biden administration’s relatively aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement, amounts to a landmark verdict, similar in many ways to the 2001 ruling that found Microsoft guilty of monopolistic conduct. Yet if that case is any indication, Google is unlikely to face serious consequences — nor is it plausible that antitrust remedies really address the biggest problems with the search giant.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” wrote federal judge Amit Mehta of the US district court for DC in his decision earlier in August. Google has known for years this moment might come and has done everything possible to avoid or delay it, including a policy of automatically deleting chat messages between executives after twenty-four hours. But at long last a legal ruling of monopoly has arrived, with all its potential ramifications.
The ruling focuses on Google’s long-running practice of paying giant sums to other tech firms to…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Rob Larson
