By: Hayley Strahs
Editor-in-Chief
On Sept. 2, Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in US v. Google that Google must share its data to comply with antitrust laws. In 2024, courts found the company in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits harmful monopolies in the American economy. US v. Google is the biggest tech-related antitrust case since the landmark US v. Microsoft, in which the US government forced Microsoft to limit its jurisdiction over the personal computer market.
The origin of US v. Google dates back to October 2020, when the Department of Justice and eleven states filed a complaint against Google, accusing the corporation of monopolistic practices. 38 other states filed a supplementary suit in December before petitioning to merge the two similar suits into one. The plaintiffs claimed that, through positing itself as the default search engine on most phone operating systems, Google maintained a monopoly on the search engine market. Moreover, Google entered into revenue-sharing agreements (RSAs) with numerous phone service providers, promising to allot the companies a portion of its ad revenue. With its RSAs motivating so many companies to cooperate, Google became the dominant search tool and drove out many of its competitors.
Notably, Mehta’s decision does not involve Google selling its operating system, Android, or its search engine, Chrome. Instead, Google must relinquish its private search data to its competitors, and now has restrictions on RSAs. The Monopoly Busters Caucus in the House of Representatives issued a statement, commenting, “In practice, this ruling allows Google to stay a monopoly. Despite finding Google guilty of search monopolization, the court is allowing the company to retain Chrome and Android, key tools that Google uses to dominate the market.” While Mehta claims that Google’s data held more monopolistic utility than its software, critics, such as Open Markets Institute Thinktank Executive Director Barry Lynn, are calling the decision “a slap on the wrist” for such a large-scale monopoly suit. However, with the rise of generative AI technology, the economic value of pure search data is skyrocketing. Google’s technological dominance has yet to hit the AI world; companies like OpenAI and Anthropic consistently outrank Google’s AI tool, Gemini, in performance and popularity. Nonetheless, the landmark ruling affirms Google’s current monopoly position within search engines and leaves much up in the air regarding the uptick in AI usage. As regulations regarding AI increase, Google and other corporations have an unprecedented technological future ahead of them.
(Sources: Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, NY Times, Purdue Global Law School Review, The Guardian, University of Miami Law Review)