Judge Says Google Is an Illegal Monopoly: Now What? – Video

A U.S. federal judge has ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on Internet search and advertising. Now, of course, we all know that Google is the largest search engine. It’s not a crime to have the most popular product that everyone uses. The big problem here, however, is that a judge is saying that the way Google does business is actually breaking the law, because it’s illegal to act in a way that harms competition. And part of that has to do with how Google pays companies like Apple and Samsung to make Google the default search engine on phones. In his decision. The U.S. district judge wrote quote after carefully considering and weighing the testimony and evidence, the court came to the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist and has behaved as such to maintain its monopoly. Google responded with a statement from Kent Walker, the company’s president of Global Affairs, who said that the company plans to appeal and Walker said, quote, this decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we should not make it easily available. Now, the Justice Department has also released its own statement on the ruling in the lawsuit. The Justice Department pointed out how Google paid Apple and Samsung billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine on smartphones and phone browsers, giving Google all of this user data in a stronger and stronger way. And the argument is that it makes it difficult for other search engines to compete. The New York Times reported that Google paid Apple about $18 billion in 2021 to make Google the default search engine on iPhones. And that’s just for the search engine. The government also accused Google of having an illegal monopoly on the advertising in its search results. This whole ordeal has been dragging on. The lawsuit was filed in 2020. The trial was last year and lasted 10 weeks and now the judge has ruled that Google violated the law. So what now? Well, there may be a ruling on what the punishment or remedy should be. The court may say what Google needs to change to fix this illegal monopoly behavior. It’s been a huge mistake for the government to go after big tech giants and their monopolies. Earlier this year, the Justice Department sued Apple over how it makes it hard for iPhone customers to abandon the iPhone and switch to Android. That fight is still ongoing. Last year, the FTC sued Amazon for blocking competition, and the FTC also has an ongoing lawsuit with Meta over how it built a monopoly on social media when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, and the agency is trying to break the company up. The last time the government really changed things by breaking it up was in the 1990s when Microsoft was found to have an illegal monopoly on how Internet Explorer was the dominant browser on Windows machines. That ultimately dragged on for years and went all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where the U.S. government and Soft settled out of court, and Microsoft agreed to some changes. Now, expect this Google case to drag on for a long time, and appeals will take a while. And a former FTC chairman told the New York Times that this could even go to the Supreme Court. In other words, you might be Googling this news for a while. I’m Bridget Carey. If you want to stay up to date on the latest developments, you can also subscribe to our channel. That way you can stay up to date on the latest developments in the world of technology.