Google has dominated the online world for years, even decades, but the tech giant’s reign may soon be drawing a close. According to insiders, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is considering breaking up Google, following a landmark antitrust ruling earlier this month, in which a federal court found that Google had illegally the online search and text advertising markets.
On August 5, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has violated the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote. He explained that there are actual markets for general search services and text advertisements in those searches. “Google has monopoly power in those markets,” the judge determined, adding both that the tech giant’s “distribution agreements are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects” and that “Google has not offered valid procompetitive justifications for those agreements.” Further, Mehta noted, “Google has exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive prices for general search text ads. That conduct has allowed Google to earn monopoly profits.”
Mehta gave some focus to the fact that Google has brokered “distribution agreements” with mobile phone manufacturers like Apple, ensuring that Google is not only the default search tool installed on Android phones, iPhones, iPads, and the like, but is in fact the only search tool pre-loaded on such devices. Google has paid as much as $26 billion to mobile phone manufacturing companies to ensure that its search tool is the only pre-loaded onto mobile devices, often with no way to delete it or remove it from its default place. Google has additionally ensured that its search tools and browsers are giving preferential treatment by barring mobile device manufacturers from accessing apps like Gmail or Google Play on their devices unless Google’s terms are agreed to. Accordingly, the DOJ is considering divesting the Android operating system, which is owned by Google and used on approximately 2.5 billion devices worldwide.
The DOJ is further considering requiring Google to either sell Google Ads (previously known as AdWords) or meet interoperability standards to ensure the program works across other search engines too. According to Mehta’s ruling, Google has monopolized the search text ads market, increasing its pricing in that market without regard to its competitors or its clients, effectively ensuring that advertisers are forced to choose between spending on Google Ads or ads on other search engines. In 2020 alone, Google made about $100 billion from search text ads, which regularly accounts for roughly a third of the tech giant’s total revenue.
Google has additionally illegally ensured that its search engine receives more user data than other search engines do (reportedly 16 times more than its next closest competitor) and has ensured via contracts that its competitors have insufficient access to user data, hampering their ability to both improve search results or compete against Google. Looking to its first case against AT&T in the 1950s, the DOJ may require Google to divest at least a portion of its data access to rival search engines. The DOJ is also considering measures to ensure that Google does not maintain an unfair advantage in the development of artificial intelligence (AI).
The DOJ will be working with Mehta in constructing a plan to break up Google’s monopoly and restore competition to the market. Any plan devised by the DOJ will have to be approved by the judge before being implemented, and the judge would force Google to comply. If the DOJ forces the breakup of Google, fracturing the corporation into smaller companies, it would be the largest corporate antitrust breakup since AT&T was broken up in 1982 following a nearly century-long communications monopoly.
The potential breakup of Google could have a significant impact on American elections. “This is a victory for Americans who want free and fair elections,” commented Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow at Family Research Council and election integrity adviser at FRC Action, in response to Mehta’s ruling earlier this month. “When Google allegedly manipulates search results to suppress results on issues like the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, including the iconic photo of him after the shooting raising his fist in the air with the American flag in the background, that is election interference, and should not be tolerated.”
Last month, Google blocked news of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump from appearing in autocomplete search results. Searches for “assassination attempt” returned autocomplete results referring to assassination attempts against figures like Adolf Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Pope John Paul II, but not Trump, despite the fact that Trump had been shot in the side of the head at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, less than two weeks prior. A full search for “assassination attempt Trump” yielded no autocomplete results. Likewise, a search for “Trump Butler,” referring to the site of the attempted assassination, returned no autocomplete results. A search for “Trump shot” was corrected by autocomplete to “Trump Soho,” “Trump shoe,” “Trump shuttle,” or “Trump show.”
More recently, Google allowed Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign to manipulate search text ads attached to news stories, giving the impression that major news outlets such as the Associated Press, USA Today, The Guardian, The Independent, Time Magazine, NPR, PBS, CNN, CBS News, and others. Spokesmen for the news organizations clarified that they were not aware that the Harris campaign was coopting their names, logos, and branding in that way. Google insisted that its rules and policies were not being violated in any way by the Harris campaign.
In fact, Google has a lengthy history of supporting Democratic political candidates — and opposing Republicans. A report earlier this year revealed that Google had “interfered” in U.S. elections at least 41 times since 2008, each time in favor of Democrats. In addition to supporting Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and reelection campaign, Google also manipulated search results to favor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016 and worked to “prevent” a Trump reelection in 2020. Google intentionally manipulated search results, overrepresenting news sources with a left-wing or left-leaning bias, actively suppressing and blacklisting conservative-leaning news sources, linking searches for Republican candidates to searches for “Nazism,” suppressing Republican candidates’ campaign websites from search results, and outright blocked tens of millions of election-related emails from the Republican National Convention. Google is currently at work on its 2024 election efforts, including a revised “sensitive events” policy which may significantly impact the flow of information regarding election results, especially given Google’s monopoly over online searches.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
