The World Is Stuck in the Google Web

A federal judge has declared Google a monopolist. In a 277-page decision released yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta concluded that the online-search company abused its dominance and suffocated competitors—in part by paying Apple and Samsung tens of billions of dollars a year to make Google the default search engine on mobile devices.

Does this mean curtains for Googling? Hardly. Google plans to appeal the decision, which would add to an already lengthy process (the Department of Justice initially brought this case in 2020). After all this, Google may be compelled to change its business practices in a way that might curtail its illicit behavior: Perhaps it will be forced to split off its search business or Android mobile operating system. Maybe it will be prohibited from paying Apple for iPhone search preference. The government could make Google stop paying makers of Android phones to include the company’s apps.

But it’s possible, and even likely, that almost nothing will change for consumers or for Google, no matter what the court decides. This case takes inspiration from the antitrust ruling against Microsoft 24 years ago. Microsoft had been accused of using its monopoly position in operating systems to quash competition in the developing web-browser market. At the time, Windows was used on more than 90 percent of personal computers worldwide, and Microsoft had built Internet Explorer into its operating system—arguably preventing nascent competitors from gaining a foothold. To remedy this problem, the court initially decided that Microsoft should be split into two companies: an operating-system company for Windows, and a different entity for its other business interests. Microsoft appealed to prevent that decision, and was successful.

[Read: The open secret of Google Search]

The Microsoft case ended up being settled around matters related to the distribution of the Windows operating system, which allowed the computer makers who licensed it to make changes and adjustments to the software included on their machines (including web browsers). Years later, it’s clear that Microsoft didn’t really need the web-browser market after all: It built and grew large, successful business units in gaming, cloud computing, and business services, while retaining strong control of its operating system. Today, Windows is still the dominant desktop operating system, and Microsoft is bigger and more powerful than ever.

In contrast to Internet Explorer and Microsoft, search and advertising are the very heart of Google’s business. It seems likely that the government will seek to end the massive payments that make Google the default search action when people type words into an address bar, which may be a boon to the company’s competitors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company offers a competing search engine called Bing, testified that Google’s dominance has created a “Google web.” Although Apple would lose the billions of dollars that it is paid by Google annually, it would potentially have a new incentive to launch its own search engine—a source of possible new revenue in addition to new competition.

[Read: How Google ran out of ideas]

But even if the payola is forced to end, that doesn’t mean competitors would arise or thrive in the search market. The DOJ has been aggressively pursuing antitrust action—against Google but also against Apple (for its alleged iPhone monopoly) and Meta (for its control of Instagram and WhatsApp)—but these cases arguably needed to happen a decade or more earlier, when the tech companies had accrued less power and the activities they facilitated were still developing. Blocking the Google acquisition of the ad-tech company DoubleClick in 2007 might have prevented some of the company’s subsequent monopoly abuse, because DoubleClick put the digital-ad industry under Google’s control.

Nadella is right about the Google web. Google is synonymous with search. When you search, you may feel that you are Googling even if you are not. Competitor searches all look and even work pretty much like Google: Although the URL may not say Google, the experience does. Even if consumers were given a choice of default search engine on their phone, many would probably choose Google anyway (perhaps because they haven’t heard of DuckDuckGo or Bing). In theory, the government could impose that browsers randomly select a search engine, but Google-pilled consumers might just go back to the familiar comfort of Google instead. As happened with Microsoft, the government could win its antitrust fight against Google on paper but lose it in practice. Monopoly is not illegal, but anticompetitive practices are. A quarter century after its launch, Google may have insinuated itself so deeply into online life that competition sufficient to unseat it is impossible or at least very difficult, because the company’s search product has become infrastructural. Some speculation about Google’s post-antitrust fate suggests the arrival of special-purpose Baby Googles, or forcing Google to let competitors access its search “secret sauce” in their own products. But even those outcomes just amount to more Googling, in the end.

We must await the appeal, and then the decision, and then the resolution, all of which could take years more, on top of the nearly four that have passed since the DOJ brought its case against Google. During that time, Google’s web-search market share has declined slightly but still accounts for more than 85 percent of U.S. searches and about 90 percent of global ones. When the dust settles, the pressure to end Google’s illegal monopoly on search might produce a lot of court documents, news stories, and hand-wringing, but few changes to the actual practice of searching the web.