The Trial of the Century?

I thought that this development deserved more attention. Google is facing an anti-trust suit. Dave Michaels reports at the Wall Street Journal:

Google, the country’s dominant search engine, faces its biggest legal threat ever this week when the company goes on civil trial in Washington on allegations of violating U.S. antitrust laws.

The Justice Department’s case is aimed at Google search, and whether the company has used illegal agreements to sideline its rivals and harmed consumers and advertisers in the process. Google pays billions of dollars to Apple, for example, to be the default search engine on the Safari browser.

Alphabet-owned Google grew up during an era of more relaxed antitrust enforcement, particularly against technology companies that developed innovative—and often free—ways to explore and use the internet. Efforts to regulate Google and other technology giants have failed to advance in Congress in recent years. In the absence of such rules, the government is trying to use antitrust law to govern competition on the web and put curbs on the internet’s gatekeepers. Here are some crucial questions about the biggest U.S. antitrust trial since the government challenged Microsoft more than 20 years ago.

while at NPR Dara Kerr remarks:

The case against Google focuses on the company paying billions of dollars each year for exclusive agreements with phone makers, like Apple and Samsung, and web browsers, like Mozilla, which runs Firefox.

Those agreements let Google be the default search engine on most devices. The Justice Department say that by securing this position, Google has been able to box out smaller rivals.

DuckDuckGo is one of those smaller rivals. It has centered its search business around privacy and ensuring users aren’t tracked — unlike Google, which has long tracked users for targeted advertising. Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s vice president of public affairs, says she’s glad this case is headed to trial.

“Google has used its monopoly power to block meaningful competition in the search market by putting a stranglehold on major distribution points for more than a decade,” Bazbaz wrote in an email. “So even though DuckDuckGo provides something extremely valuable that people want and Google won’t provide — real privacy — Google makes it unduly difficult to use DuckDuckGo by default.”

The key point is that being a monopoly is not illegal but using your monopoly to extend or preserve your monopoly is.

I don’t know whether the United States has a basis for this suit or how it will turn out. We’ll know in several months. They say three but I have my doubts. My own view is that I think that Congress has been remiss and the business model used by Google (and Meta and others) should be outlawed on privacy grounds.

I don’t know how much of this suit is rent-seeking and how much is a shot across the bow but some of both of those are bound to be the case.