The Boston Globe, August 2024
It’s taken nearly a year for a federal court to decide that Google’s internet search business violates federal antitrust law features. And that was the easy part. Next comes a more daunting challenge for US District Judge Amit Mehta: What to do about it.
Mehta concluded that Google broke the Sherman Antitrust Act by playing hardball to ensure that internet search requests from nearly every user in the United States go to Google Search, instead of rivals such as Microsoft’s Bing service. Mehta found that Google has succeeded in this so completely that it’s virtually impossible for any would-be competitor to gain a foothold. Meanwhile, Google’s market share in search has risen from 80 percent in 2009 to 95 percent today.
Google has succeeded by dominating multiple online chokepoints. For instance, Google’s parent company Alphabet owns Chrome, the world’s most widely used Internet browser. And Chrome’s default setting for search takes you to Google. Alphabet also owns Android, the most popular smartphone operating system in the world. Once again Google Search is the default setting on Android phones, and the companies that make Android smartphones, including Samsung, Sony, and Motorola, are paid billions to keep it that way. And Google pays still more billions to be the default search service on the iPhone.
