By: Sean Sung ‘27
Volume IX – Issue I – Fall 2023
I. Introduction and the Background on Google’s Recent Antitrust Case
On January 24th, 2023, The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) brought a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google LLC, accusing Google of monopolizing three markets: the website ranking market, the search advertising market, and the search engine market. Corresponding states like New York, California, Connecticut, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, and others are suing along with the DOJ. [1] Such lawsuits have also brought private plaintiffs to sue Google for roughly the same topic. The European Commission has already ruled that Google illegally maintained its monopoly, and the General Court of the European Union backed the Commission’s decision. The DOJ cites that Google holds around 85% of the search engine market as the impact of these anti-competitive practices. [2] The DOJ cites Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In the United States, it is not illegal to have a monopoly, and it is not illegal to raise prices because of a monopoly because innovation and actions that benefit the market and consumers can lead to monopolistic tendencies. The government does not want to limit such innovation. In other words, it is not illegal to be dominant if the company is better than its competitors. However, Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act prohibits maintaining monopolies through exclusionary conduct and anti-competitive practice. The DOJ claims that Google’s contracts with original equipment manufacturers, like Apple, LG, Samsung, and Motorola, with Internet Service Providers, like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, and browser developers, like Mozilla, Opera, and UCWeb, to keep Google as the primary search engine on all products is anti-competitive in nature and is illegal. [3] This Google antitrust case is most similar to Microsoft’s antitrust case in 2001, since Microsoft was sued by the DOJ for also maintaining an illegal monopoly through restrictive deals with original equipment manufacturers to install Windows as the primary operating system on newly produced equipment. [4] In this article, we will cover market and legal definitions, the Microsoft antitrust case, its relation and detail with the Google antitrust case, and the weakness of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.