In a landmark case – the USA vs. Google LLC – a ruling in federal court in August, 2024, declared Google to be a monopoly. True, no one has paid much attention to this case, but it was the most aggressive attempt ever by our federal government to stop Google from dominating the lives of billions of people worldwide – from rigging elections, indoctrinating children, censoring online content, manipulating people’s opinions and destroying its potential competitors.
The case, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), was based in antitrust law, which has been used in the past to break up monopolies. Remember when the DOJ broke up AT&T into the “Baby Bells”? That was an antitrust case.
And our leaders on both sides of the aisle – Democrat Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, for example – have been calling for Google’s breakup for years. Even Roger McNamee, one of the original investors in Google, has been calling for the company’s breakup since 2018.
This was the big case that was supposed to do the job.
After that ruling, the penalty phase of the case began, during which U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta tried to figure out how to stop Google’s monopolistic practices. It has taken more than a year for the judge to decide the remedies; his decision just came down.
The rumor was that Mehta was going to require Google to sell off Chrome, its surveillance browser – one of about 200 platforms Google uses to monitor and analyze virtually everything people do 24 hours a day. Losing Chrome would have been the equivalent of a mosquito bite for Google, which buys a new company about once a week (one way of shutting down competitors).
It also would have made Google richer; rumors were that possible buyers might have been willing to pay upwards of $50 billion for Chrome. And Google still would have had access to the data Chrome collects about how people are using the internet, in part because Chrome’s new owner would continue to use Google’s “quarantine list” to see if a website was safe before taking the user there. Even Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox use this list – giving Google information about everything people do on Safari and Firefox. To learn more about this issue, see the investigative article I wrote for U.S. News & World Report entitled, “The New Censorship.”
So, what, you ask, did the judge do? Did he break up the company – which he had every right to do under antitrust law?
Well, when his decision was announced, Google’s stock immediately increased by 8 percent. So, no, there was no breakup.
The main things Mehta ordered were trivial. He prohibited Google from requiring browsers to make Google their default search engine, for one thing – at least in the U.S., which is a small part of Google’s worldwide market.
Most interesting to me was that Mehta required Google to make its “search index” – the big database it uses to generate search results – accessible to certain unspecified “qualified competitors” – which might turn out to be a new source of revenue for Google.
This last ruling is a weak and pathetic variation of a proposal I published in 2019 in Bloomberg Businessweek the day before I testified before Congress for the first time. Ted Cruz entered the article into the Congressional Record.
That article was entitled, “To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public,” and it described a simple, powerful way of ending Google’s monopoly. Congress, or even the European Union’s (EU) Parliament, could simply declare the index to be a “public commons” – a light-touch form of regulation that has ample precedent in law. The content of that index is almost all stolen, after all. It’s scraped from billions of websites. It doesn’t belong to Google, and the internet itself belongs to humanity, not to a single company.
Making Google’s index public would allow thousands of individuals and companies to create new search engines, which would make the search environment like the news environment, with thousands of websites catering to niche groups and vying for people’s attention.
The DOJ is trying to spin the case as a win for the federal government, but the truth is that Google slaughtered them, and most of humanity worldwide (outside of mainland China, which has its own nefarious methods for surveilling and controlling its population) is still at the mercy of the most powerful company that has ever existed. The surveillance, censorship and manipulation will continue, with Google more arrogant and confident than ever.
