US Department of Justice files antitrust lawsuit targeting Google's monopoly in search

By Emmanuel Legrand

The US Department of Justice, joined by 11 US States, including Texas and Florida, have filed a complaint under Section 2 of the Sherman Act in the US Circuit Court in the District of Columbia, in which it claimed that Alphabet-owned Google has unlawfully maintained monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States, via "anti-competitive exclusionary practices."

  “Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy start-up with an innovative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is long gone. The Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet,” reads the opening of the filing.

  The DoJ noted that Google is "a monopolist in the general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising markets. Google aggressively uses its monopoly positions, and the money that flows from them, to continuously foreclose rivals and protect its monopolies.” 

Google must be stopped

  Presenting the case to the press, Associate Deputy Attorney General Ryan Shores said: "Google is a monopoly under traditional antitrust principles and must be stopped. We are asking the court to break Google's grip on search."

  Google intends to fight the lawsuit. Google SVP of Global Affairs Kent Walker, reacted in a blogpost by stating: "Today’s lawsuit by the Department of Justice is deeply flawed. People use Google because they choose to, not because they're forced to, or because they can't find alternatives. This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers. To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use."

  Scott Cleland, author of the book 'Search And Destroy: Why You Can't Trust Google Inc.', wrote in a blogpost that the DoJ was "wisely not making the case about Google’s discrimination of search results," which were angles that were pursued by the Federal Trade Commission or the European Union's antitrust division, but rather focusing on Google's “anti-competitive and exclusionary” business contractual arrangements. In the former case, Cleland said Google’s antitrust defense are "relatively strongest and most developed," while on the latter, Google’s "good legal defenses are meager." 

A change in government policy

  He elaborated: "By design, this case evidently is constructed not to satisfy a broad variety of complainants and grievances, but to win, and win handily in court, on the most unlawful and harmful, 'anti-competitive and exclusionary' parts of their core search and search advertising businesses that comprise over 80% of Google’s revenues and most all of Google profits and market valuation."

  For Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at antitrust nonprofit the Open Markets Institute, the lawsuit reflects a change in the antitrust dogma that dominated at the DoJ in the past years. “It’s a major, major change in the government’s orientation toward monopoly power," she said in an interview in Recode. 

  The outcome of the case will be srutinised by all sides, from tech companies, in particular Amazon and Apple, but also by civil rights movement and rights holders. "US v. Google has the potential to be as significant as the Microsoft case and follows a similar argument," wrote Austin, Texas-based lawyer Chris Castle in a blogpost.