Has Google’s monopoly on the search engine market finally timed out? | John Naughton

The US justice department is belatedly addressing the company's stranglehold on digital advertising technologies in the most significant antitrust case for more than two decades

Although you'd never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it, the US justice department, alongside the attorneys general of eight states, is suing Google for abusively monopolising digital advertising technologies, thereby subverting competition through serial acquisitions" and anti-competitive auction manipulation. Or, to put it more prosaically, arguing that Google - which has between 90% and 95% of the search market - has maintained its monopoly not by making a better product, but by locking down almost every avenue through which consumers might find a different search engine and making sure they only see Google wherever they look.

Why is this significant? Basically, because the US government has been asleep at the wheel for almost a quarter of a century and has finally woken up to its democratic responsibilities. The last time it stirred itself to take on an aggressive monopolist was in 2001, when it sued Microsoft for illegally tying its Internet Explorer browser to Windows as part of a (successful) campaign to destroy Netscape, maker of the first distinctive commercial web browser, which Bill Gates and co perceived as a potentially lethal competitive threat. In an eerie echo of that earlier lawsuit, the justice department is now accusing Google of similar tactics - for example, illegally tying the company's search engine to its Android smartphone operating system and its Chrome browser. And the government is seeking to break up the company, just as it once sought to break up Microsoft.