Google’s Monopoly Sentence: Barely a Slap on the Wrist
For years, across multiple presidential administrations, the US government has been pursuing aggressive lawsuits against the tech giants. The toothless sentence Google recently received for its illegal search monopoly suggests the effort is all for naught.
District judge Amit Mehta largely accepted Google’s arguments about remedies to its proven monopoly, leaving the disciplining of the company to “market forces” in the form of rising AI technology. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
After years of legal process, the penalties for Google’s legally adjudicated search monopoly finally came down last month. After being ruled to have illegally controlled the industry (as well as the online ad-tech industry, the subject of a separate case), many observers anticipated serious penalties from the Donald Trump–initiated legal case. The Department of Justice (DOJ) sought to have the firm partially broken up through a forced sale of the company’s Chrome browser, to end the company’s exclusivity deal with Apple, and to hand over some search data to smaller competitors.
Yet in the end, only the latter is being required of Google. The district judge, Amit Mehta, largely accepted the company’s arguments about remedies to its proven monopoly, leaving the disciplining of the company to “market forces” in the form of rising AI technology. If the verdict is a preview of the outcomes of the numerous other antitrust cases brought against the platform giants, it suggests a “techlash” with very little force.
Slap on the Tentacle
The penalties ruling is underwhelming, and don’t take my word for it — “Google Dodges Worst Penalties in U.S. Antitrust Case” was the Wall Street Journal’s headline, and Google’s and Apple’s stocks jumped on the news. The business press widely hailed the ruling as more or less the best-case outcome for the companies.
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