US Court Accuses Google of Building Illegal Search Engine Monopoly

US Court Accuses Google: On Monday, a US judge accused Google that its search engine has illegally exploited its power to crush competition and prevent innovation.

The judge also added that the leading tech company has broken the antitrust law and invested billions of money to create an illegal monopoly and become the world's only default browser.

This decision was ruled by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta and could create a commotion among others.

Earlier a trail began which pitted the US Justice Department against Google in the biggest antitrust battle in 25 years.

Before coming to this decision there was a 10-week trial last year that got a lot of evidence against these big tech companies, including testimony from top executives at Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

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Three months after the closing the trial, Mehta in early May made his decision.

It also opens the door for a second trial to look into similar solutions which could include the spilf of Alphabet Inc which is the parent company of Google.

This will significantly affect the online advertising scene that Google has its control on for years.

On Monday, US Judge Amit Mehta said, “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”

He also said, “It enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices.” He added that the fact that Google dominance in the search market shows it has monopoly.

A recent study reports that Google's search engine handles about 8.5 billion queries every day which is twice the amount that it use to handle 12 year ago.

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The lawyers further said that Google's monopoly let it charge ads unfairly high prices and did not spend more time and money to make the search engine better which is a careless of Google and that hurt users.

Mehta's decision focuses on the money that Google spends to make its search engine the default one on new phones and other devices.

Mehta further added that in 2021, Google spend around $26 billion on those default deals to make it happen.

Mehta further wrote, "The default is extremely valuable real estate. Even if a new entrant were positioned from a quality standpoint to bid for the default when an agreement expires, such a firm could compete only if it were prepared to pay partners upwards of billions of dollars in revenue share and make them whole for any revenue shortfalls resulting from the change.”

The US Judge noted, “Google, of course, recognizes that losing defaults would dramatically impact its bottom line. For instance, Google has projected that losing the Safari default would result in a significant drop in queries and billions of dollars in lost revenues.”

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Google also commented back that users have also switched search engines in the past when they were not satisfied with the results.

Mehta said that on the Microsoft Edge browser around 80% of all searches are done on the Bing search engine. According to the judge, this shows that other search engines are also better and can do well if Google is not made the default one.

Earlier, under Trump administration, federal authorities had also sued Meta, Amazon.com and Apple highlightings that they have

illegally maintained monopoly.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta concluded that Google has been illegally operating as a monopoly and to hold another legal phase to figure out what changes or punishments should be implemented to find solutions to these problems.

Mehta scheduled a hearing on September 6 to get things ready for next step.

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