In a historic blow to one of the biggest of big tech companies, the U.S. District Court for Washington D.C. yesterday ruled that Google is a monopoly. In an opinion published Monday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said the company has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, and declared that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
On its face, the decision has nothing to do with Android, or YouTube, or any of the other services that have helped grow the company’s market dominance over the years. Rather, the focus is on its oldest business—search. Following revelations earlier this year that the company paid billions to make Google the default search engine on Safari and other browsers, the court decided that “Google’s distribution agreements are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects.”
The severity of the declaration means that Google probably can’t just pay its way out of this one. If you remember the fallout from the antitrust case against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer strategy in 2001, you’ve already got an idea of how this all could play out.
But it’s been 23 years since then, Google is much bigger now than Microsoft was at the turn of the millennium, and there’s a good chance it’s deeply embedded in your life. Here’s my best guess as to what happens next, and how the Google antitrust decision could affect you.
Is the Google antitrust decision final?
Possibly not! While Judge Mehta’s decision has been applauded by the White House as “a victory for the American people,” Google has already stated that it plans to appeal. In a statement posted to X (formerly Twitter), Google president of global affairs Kent Walker argued that its dominance is simply the natural result of its search engine’s quality—conveniently ignoring the billions it paid to Apple to ensure it was the default search option on millions of iPhones and instead focusing on a snippet in Mehta’s opinion that calls Google search, “the industry’s highest quality search engine.”
“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine,” Walker’s post reads, “but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.” The executive says that Google “will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use” until its appeals process is completed.
What punishments could Google face?
Because this week’s ruling focused on finding guilt, penalties are likely to be assigned during separate proceedings. But similar to how Microsoft had to settle with the DOJ to alter its business strategy in 2001, Google is likely to walk away from this with more than a fine (although a fine will probably still be involved).
Once the dust has settled, you could very well open Safari or Firefox to a screen prompting you to choose a default search engine, rather than having the browser simply choose Google for you. The EU already enforces a similar browser-selection process on both iPhone and Android, but it’s unclear what exactly the UI could look like and which alternatives might be highlighted.
It’s also possible penalties could be as severe as forcing Google to break up, but given that the courts’ complaint focuses on just one aspect of its business, that’s unlikely.
While choosing a new default search engine might be set-it-and-forget-it on your end, it would be a big boon for Google alternatives, including Microsoft’s Bing, which Mehta’s opinion said only sees “roughly 6% of all search queries” in the United States despite being second place in the market. It’s also possible Apple might take the opportunity to build its own search engine, a notion Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman last year said the company has been toying with. While Apple has had little incentive to go through with development on that project until now, ad revenue from a homegrown search engine could help recoup money lost from its $20 billion deal with Google, which will almost certainly come to an end if Google’s appeal fails. (Gurman suggests an Apple-developed search engine could bring in ad revenue rivaling the Apple Watch.)
Will Apple be targeted next?
As the Coca-Cola to Google’s Pepsi, it’s reasonable to think that Apple could be trustbusters’ next target. The iPhone maker is currently dealing with a lawsuit filed in March that accused it of monopolizing the smartphone business, although the details of the case are perhaps a bit too different from Google’s for it to serve as a precedent.
The DOJ’s case against Apple targets how it limits third-party services on its platform in favor of Apple-developed alternatives, while its case against Google was actually about its deals with other companies. Essentially, Apple is being targeted for blocking out competition across its product suite, while the accusations against Google are more about collusion with competitors.
Like Apple, Google’s business has ballooned beyond search into the Android operating system, physical phones, its own browser, YouTube, maps, and more, but the Court’s monopoly accusation wasn’t related to how many companies Google has bought or the markets it has cornered. Rather, it was about how one facet of its business—search—interacts with other companies. It was when Google started paying Apple, Mozilla, and others to highlight its search engine that it drew accusations of anticompetitive behavior.
Apple is likely to suffer by losing its annual $20 billion payout from Google, but this case alone does not set a dangerous precedent for a similar suit. Its own DOJ case is the third it has faced in 14 years, and the DOJ’s concerns are more similar to those coming from Europe than the ones highlighted in Judge Mehta’s ruling. It remains to be seen how receptive U.S. courts are to these kinds of complaints.
Could this affect the Pixel 9 launch?
Google does not need this kind of bad press right now. Its next smartphone, the Pixel 9, is set to debut in a week, and you can bet it’s going to be pushing Google services hard during its launch event.
That said, any fallout from yesterday’s decision is unlikely to affect a launch coming so soon, as penalties still need to be decided and Google needs to be given time to appeal. Given Walker’s statement, it seems the company is planning to maintain business as usual in the meantime.
And regardless of the eventual outcome, Google’s own products are unlikely to suffer from the decision over the long term, as Mehta’s chief concerns are with the company’s payments to other device makers. As Google already owns the Pixel brand, it is likely free to continue to default its owned services on the devices it makes. That goes for the Chrome browser as well—but this could change depending on how the DOJ’s lawsuit against Apple plays out.
A surprising blow to AI
Surprisingly, the biggest victim in this decision might not be Google’s search engine, but its AI efforts. That’s because data it acquired through its search monopoly could then be applied to training its AI. If Google loses its search lead, it threatens what might be one of its biggest dataset contributors.
That said, it’s unclear how exactly Google builds its AI training datasets. While the company has incorporated AI into the search user experience, its privacy policy does not state the full extent of the “information” it uses to train AI, only promising to anonymize user data before using it elsewhere. There are exceptions—for example, the company has said it only uses Workspace data to train features like spellcheck and Smart Compose—so its hard to say how far-reaching the effects of the ruling could be.
What we do know is that marketers will be watching this case closely. In a statement emailed to press including CNN and NPR, Emarketer senior analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf said Google’s “ubiquity is its biggest strength, especially as competition heats up among AI-powered search alternatives.”
