Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Technology sector myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The big technology companies try to baffle outsiders with complexity. So it took almost four years for a US federal court to conclude the antitrust case against Google brought by the US Department of Justice. But having trawled through millions of pages of submissions, 3,500 exhibits and dozens of witness testimonies, the conclusion reached by Judge Amit Mehta this week was one of stark simplicity: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”Those words will reverberate throughout the global digital economy as lawyers scramble to understand their implications. “Not a single word of statute has changed but we now have a fundamental change in the antitrust landscape for companies all around the world,” Michelle Meagher, a senior fellow at SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, tells me. “This is stunning.” What the practical impact of Mehta’s 286-page ruling will be, however, is another question and we await the court’s remedies. Google said it would first appeal against the judgment. Its initial response, dripping with sarcasm, sketched out its likely defence. “The decision recognises that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” said Kent Walker, president of global affairs at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.Google has long argued that it offers a great search product to consumers for free — so where’s the harm? But Mehta highlighted three ways in which Google’s dominance distorted competition. The company’s grip over 90 per cent of the search market enabled it to make super-profits from advertisers. Its business model, based on surveillance advertising, compromised user privacy, which rival search engines might otherwise prioritise. And its massive payments to Apple, and other tech companies, for default distribution of Google search on their devices and services in effect buy off potential competitors, stifling innovation.Still, it will be difficult for the court to propose effective and enduring remedies to break the monopoly. As the judge explained, the company established its dominance because it invented better technology and offered a superior service. Google has only reinforced its advantage by amassing vast troves of search data, enabling it constantly to improve that technology.Scale is a quality that itself changes the dynamics of digital markets. Even a company as rich as Apple concluded that it made no sense to invest multiple billions of dollars to develop a rival search engine when it could receive $20bn or so a year from Google for a tie-up deal. Nor has Microsoft succeeded in turning Bing into a potent alternative search engine. Generative artificial intelligence might yet reshuffle the competitive cards. But the high hopes that Microsoft invested in OpenAI’s generative AI technology turbocharging Bing appear to have been dashed, while inflating search costs.Possible remedies could take several forms. Google might yet seek to settle and accept a giant fine. The court might scrap Google’s distribution deals — although that might initially hurt Apple more than Google. A more radical structural option would be to break up Alphabet, separating its Google search engine from its Android phone operating system and Chrome browser, for example. Some rivals would rather split Google’s advert sales business from its search engine.At RemedyFest, a conference held by start-up accelerator Y Combinator in Washington earlier this year, regulators, politicians and technologists explored some innovative ideas for ending Google’s monoculture and rewilding the internet by increasing the interoperability of services and encouraging data portability. The EU has already mandated that users are presented with choice screens offering different search engines and browsers by default.Brendan Eich, chief executive of Brave Software, tells me that daily installations of his company’s browser in the Apple ecosystem in Europe increased 50 per cent following the implementation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act and the release of Apple’s latest operating system in March. “Users want choice and it should be up to them to determine which search engine or browser they’d like to use,” he says.By exposing the ways in which Google dominates the search market, Mehta has performed an invaluable public service and is nudging open the door for change. It is now up to policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors to seize the opportunity to imagine — and build — a more open and competitive digital [email protected]
