It’s Official: Google Is A Monopoly
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A federal judge declared what many have known for years: Google is a monopoly. Specifically, it has a monopoly over online search and the search text ad market.
If you've used Google in the past few years, you know that it sucks. It once felt like magic: a search engine that would quickly take you wherever you needed to go online. But in 2024 all that old magic is gone. Relevant search results are buried under ads and worthless AI answers scraped from Reddit.
This 286-page ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta on Monday helps explain why. Google has no competition in search and doesn't need to appeal to consumers the way it would in a competitive market. The judgment is the result of a year-long showdown between the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Google. It's the biggest antitrust lawsuit since the DOJ went after Microsoft 20 years ago.
[...] If you've bought a device or searched the web in the past 15 years then you've experienced Google's market dominance. Google comes pre-loaded onto countless devices and browsers. It's so ubiquitous that its name has become the common verb for searching on the internet."
Google pays billions of dollars every year to make that happen. Around $26 billion in 2021 alone, according to the judgment. Usually, the amount is calculated as a percentage of the advertisements revenue that Google generates from queries run through the default search access points," the judgment said.
[...] Basically, Google pays huge sums of cash to every other tech company, including rivals like Apple, to keep itself the default search engine. Being the default engine gives it dominance when serving ads. It uses the ad money to pay to keep itself the default search engine. And on and on and on.
[...] And what would happen if Google stopped paying to be the default engine? A catastrophic loss of revenue.
In 2020, Google's internal modeling projected that it would lose between 60-80% of its iOS query volume should it be replaced as the default GSE on Apple devices...which would translate into net revenue losses between $28.2 and $32.7 billion," the judgment said.
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