I wish more reporters had a law background. The article is full of things that are almost true but misleading, and a handful that are flat-out wrong. For example:
> If Mehta sides with Google, the company's business practices will likely remain the same. If he rules in favor of the Justice Department, it's unclear how he'd sanction Google. It could be anything from fines to a restructuring of the company.
Put aside that “sanction” is a term of art that is misused here and focus on the glaring inaccuracy: DOJ cannot request fines as a remedy for the Section 2 allegations they have brought! Add to that the fact that restructuring is vanishingly unlikely and you get a paragraph so misleading that it should be stricken from the article.
DOJ, if they win the first part of the trial, is almost certainly going to request injunctive relief to prevent Google from entering into the exclusionary contracts that they challenged in this case. They could also ask for a court-ordered monitoring program to ensure ongoing compliance with the antitrust laws for a period of time. At the extreme, there could be some form of mandated data sharing to rivals to compensate for Google excluding them from search access points and depriving them of the scale DOJ says they need to compete.
I'll do some free work for NPR and rewrite their paragraph:
> If Judge Mehta sides with Google, the company's business practices can remain unchanged. The Justice Department has not yet revealed what remedies they would request if Judge Mehta rules in their favor, but they are likely to include an order preventing Google from entering into deals that give the company's search engine preferential treatment on iOS, Android, and the FireFox browser. A breakup of the company is unlikely.
Thank you for this, I was thinking something similar and I'm not even a lawyer!
That said, I have been a competitor[1] to Google in the past.
What is missed here in the comment and in the article is that the "monopoly" part is really advertising, NOT search. If the Judge ordered Google to open up their SERPs[2] to other Advertising networks that would change things for the better.
The reasoning goes as follows; In order to be cost effective, search advertising needs a lot of views. More traffic equals more views. We measured income as "RPM" or revenue per thousand (SERPs in this case), so if you're nominal advertising rate was $1 per click, and in a thousand views of 10 links each (10,000 links shown) you got one click, you would have an RPM of $1. What isn't as well known is that some advertisements, like credit card sign ups, would pay $100 for a click & signup. That meant you could go 100,000 queries with just one click and still be making $1 RPM :-).
Anyway, the reason Google pays $23 billion to Apple to have them send them search traffic is that Apple iPhone users are "high end" and will buy stuff after searching for them. One of the reason's Blekko was lucky to get 10M searches per day was because Google was spending billions to have any search traffic sent to them instead.
So if you tell Google they have to allow other people to sell ads using their search results, and they have to provide those results at a reasonable an non-discriminatory price, then it breaks Google's monopoly on search ads. Most people who have a search frontend use Bing's results because they are cheaper and available through the old Yahoo! BOSS api. But if Google offered their results sans Google ad insertions instead. You could make a search website that had Google non-spammy results for cost. People would pay for that, especially people who don't use search to shop but use it to find things. Google's long tail crawl is still better than Bings in that regard.
[1] VP Eng/Ops at Blekko a search competitor.
[2] Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is the 10 links and 10 snippets describing the page they point to.
> order preventing Google from entering into deals that give the company's search engine preferential treatment on iOS, Android, and the FireFox browser
Mozilla submitted a declaration to that effect, and Google mentioned it repeatedly. Google argued that once Microsoft set the precedent that Internet Explorer was free, browsers lost the ability to monetize except by selling default status in their search bar (or being subsidized by a larger platform).
Courts are understandably wary of micromanaging companies' behavior, so this is not so much a legal argument as much as it is a "beware of unintended consequences" argument.
Doesn't the fact that Google has to pay so much to be the default mean that Google isn't wielding monopoly power? Apple can command such a high price point is because being the default on Safari is that valuable and folks will happily pay billions for the privilege bidding the price up.
Of all the things to go after this seems like one of the weaker instances you could argue is anti-competitive. Like all this effort to get almost the same ruling as the EU Internet Explorer case which won't put a dent in anything.
By that logic, price fixing is okay, because you yourself don't have the power to price fix, you need to coordinate with others to do so!
The fact that they spend money in order to abuse market power, rather than already having all of that market power (without paying another party) and misusing it shouldn't be relevant.
It bears mentioning that a monopoly in and by itself is actually fine. If you provide a product or service so legitimately good that noone else can compete with you, that's fine.
What's not fine is suppressing your competitors in some form or another to achieve that monopoly, that is to say not achieving that monopoly by the sheer quality and value of your product or service.
If Apple is selling their "default search" slot to prospective buyers and Google outbids everyone else, what are you gonna do? Force Google to not bid so high? Tell Apple to not accept bids so high? That sounds worse than the supposed bad monopoly being supposedly prevented.
Paying other companies to achieve a monopoly is no less unlawful or anticompetitive than any other form of achieving a monopoly. Even monopolies achieved primarily on merit can, and have been, broken up. AT&T being the typical example there. There's a really great article on their rise and fall. [1] Ask basically anybody who was around during their heyday and most were quite happy with AT&T, but nonetheless their monopolistic level of control of telephony created poor market conditions, and so they were broken up.
> It bears mentioning that a monopoly in and by itself is actually fine. If you provide a product or service so legitimately good that noone else can compete with you, that's fine.
This is a more modern interpretation of anti-trust. And IMO a shit one, because the monopolist can never be seriously challenged by competitors. It's a sign of a broken and unhealthy market. Even if the monopolist completed fairly to ascend, once they are effectively the only choice then the product or service will eventually degrade. How will consumers even know there could be alternatives if the competition is bullied, bought, or intimidated out of the market?
I guess the argument is that they can maintain their dominance being able to buy all the defaults for that are for sale but this presumes that Google is the only one who can capitalize on being the default to the degree that they do. Either that or Google is taking a huge loss on them and making it up other ways that can only happen with market dominance but that's also pretty sus.
Punishing companies for producing a wildly successful product is a strategy that will result in competitive choice between multiple sub-par products. Strategically that seems kinda dumb.
The question of Google negotiating for default search engine status is just not a big enough problem for regulators to be involved. If the legislators want to ban that as something corporations can do then I suppose that is there prerogative, but the "damage" here to anyone that matters is hard to spot and it remains a bad idea to pile-in on Google. And the legality of preferred search engine arrangements shouldn't hinge on if the product is popular or not. How could it help anyone to ban them only if the product is the best on the market?
There are many search engines. There always have been. Google has long stopped producing the highest quality product. They are provably spending their money in a way which actively prevents competition from having a chance.
Wildly successful products can develop natural monopolies, yes, but that is not what we are seeing here.
Switching from Google to someone else is extremely easy (I've done it, I don't use Google search). If Google didn't have the best index, we'd see more people doing that. We might even see people recommending others to change their default search engine to something else to get better results.
That isn't what we're seeing. We're seeing people use Google because the results are better.
> If Mehta sides with Google, the company's business practices will likely remain the same. If he rules in favor of the Justice Department, it's unclear how he'd sanction Google. It could be anything from fines to a restructuring of the company.
Put aside that “sanction” is a term of art that is misused here and focus on the glaring inaccuracy: DOJ cannot request fines as a remedy for the Section 2 allegations they have brought! Add to that the fact that restructuring is vanishingly unlikely and you get a paragraph so misleading that it should be stricken from the article.
DOJ, if they win the first part of the trial, is almost certainly going to request injunctive relief to prevent Google from entering into the exclusionary contracts that they challenged in this case. They could also ask for a court-ordered monitoring program to ensure ongoing compliance with the antitrust laws for a period of time. At the extreme, there could be some form of mandated data sharing to rivals to compensate for Google excluding them from search access points and depriving them of the scale DOJ says they need to compete.
I'll do some free work for NPR and rewrite their paragraph:
> If Judge Mehta sides with Google, the company's business practices can remain unchanged. The Justice Department has not yet revealed what remedies they would request if Judge Mehta rules in their favor, but they are likely to include an order preventing Google from entering into deals that give the company's search engine preferential treatment on iOS, Android, and the FireFox browser. A breakup of the company is unlikely.