It’s Official: Google Is a Monopoly

A federal judge declared what many have known for years: Google is a monopoly. Specifically, it has a monopoly over online search and the search text ad market.

If you’ve used Google in the past few years, you know that it sucks. It once felt like magic: a search engine that would quickly take you wherever you needed to go online. But in 2024 all that old magic is gone. Relevant search results are buried under ads and worthless AI answers scraped from Reddit.

This 286-page ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta on Monday helps explain why. Google has no competition in search and doesn’t need to appeal to consumers the way it would in a competitive market. The judgment is the result of a year-long showdown between the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Google. It’s the biggest antitrust lawsuit since the DOJ went after Microsoft 20 years ago.

Mehta was unequivocal in his ruling. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” he wrote.

Specifically, the ruling said that Google had monopoly power in the general search and general search text ads markets. “Google’s distribution agreements are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects and Google has not offered valid procompetitive justification for those agreements,” he wrote.

If you’ve bought a device or searched the web in the past 15 years then you’ve experienced Google’s market dominance. Google comes pre-loaded onto countless devices and browsers. It’s so ubiquitous that its name has become the common verb for “searching on the internet.”

Google pays billions of dollars every year to make that happen. Around $26 billion in 2021 alone, according to the judgment. “Usually, the amount is calculated as a percentage of the advertisements revenue that Google generates from queries run through the default search access points,” the judgment said.

“In exchange for revenue share, Google not only receives default placement at the key search access points, but its partners also agree not to preload any other general search engine on the device. These distribution deals have forced Google’s rivals to find other ways to reach users.”

Basically, Google pays huge sums of cash to every other tech company, including rivals like Apple, to keep itself the default search engine. Being the default engine gives it dominance when serving ads. It uses the ad money to pay to keep itself the default search engine. And on and on and on.

“Plaintiffs easily demonstrated that Google possesses a dominant market share. Measured by query volume, Google enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices,” the judgment said.

Attempts to grab any share of that market have been failures. Bing only has 5.5% and Duck Duck Go and Yahoo have less than 3%. And it’s been this way for years with the judge noting that Google has had an over 80% share since at least 2009.

And what would happen if Google stopped paying to be the default engine? A catastrophic loss of revenue.

“In 2020, Google’s internal modeling projected that it would lose between 60-80% of its iOS query volume should it be replaced as the default GSE on Apple devices…which would translate into net revenue losses between $28.2 and $32.7 billion,” the judgment said.

There are better search engines out there. Kagi channels the old Google feeling but requires a subscription service. DuckDuckGo does a decent job of serving up Google’s results while tempering the worst of its privacy and advertising abuses. But Google makes switching away from its search engine as painful as possible.

It’s not hard to change your default search engine on a mobile device or PC, exactly. It’s just a pain in the ass. And the more complicated and annoying it is to switch, the more likely a person is to just stick to the default. And the default is Google.

Internal documents quoted in the judgment make it clear that Google knows all this.

“’Seemingly small friction points in user experiences can have a dramatically disproportionate effect on whether people drop or stick,’” Mehta wrote, quoting a document from Google’s Behavioral Economics Team. You want to think about each step, as small as it might be, and see if there is a way to eliminate it, delay it, simplify it, default it…of the tiny fraction of end users who try to change the default, many will become frustrated and simply leave the default as originally set.’”

Kent Walker, Google’s President of Global Affairs pushed back on the judgment in a public statement. “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” he said.

Walker listed some of the nice things Mehta wrote about Google in the judgment.

“Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal,” he said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

So what does all this mean for the user? The fallout from this might take years to materialize. Mehta has scheduled a follow-up hearing for September 6 where he’ll talk about what should be done about Google’s monopoly power. It’s possible he’ll recommend a selloff or restructuring of some kind. He may even tell Google it has to stop paying to be the default search engine on so many devices.

As Walker said, Google will appeal. It has an army of lawyers and billions of dollars, everything it needs to drag its fight with the Justice Department as long as possible. Billions it earned from its monopoly power.