Antitrusters, Rejoice!

“Pro consumer. Pro competition. Pro innovation.”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal used those words to herald a federal judge’s ruling from earlier this week that Google is a ​“monopolist” that has acted illegally to protect the market power of its online search engine.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia handed down that 277-page decision on Monday in the case of U.S. et al. v. Google.

The judge agreed with the federal government that the tech company behemoth has broken the law to bolster its search engine, including by paying billions of dollars a year to have smartphones and web browsers default their search queries to Google.

“I’ve said for years that Google has been violating our federal antitrust law by illegally dominating the market for search, using its market dominance to exclude competition and stifle innovation,” said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who has promoted stepped-up antitrust enforcement against other big tech businesses, including Ticketmaster.

He called Judge Mehta’s ruling a ​“long-overdue constraint on Google’s monopolistic misuse of market dominance and illegal conduct.”

What does he say to Google’s lawyers’ courtroom argument that Google’s search engine is simply a better product? That’s why it’s so widely used. That’s why it has such market dominance. (Google also argued that its agreements with companies like Apple were not exclusive, and that consumers could have changed the default settings on their devices to use other search engines.)

“The question is: Better than what?” Blumenthal countered. ​“It’s not better than what could be produced if there were real competition. Competition means innovation and new products that serve the consumer better. Right now, Google is saying its product is better because it’s excluding all the alternatives, and that’s why it’s violating the law.”

Many of these big tech antitrust lawsuits filed by the federal government — against Google, Amazon, and Meta, among others — began under the Trump administration, and have continued apace under President Biden. Trump’s Republican vice-presidential running mate for 2024, JD Vance, has also spoken in support of the big-business-busting approach of Biden-appointed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. What does Blumenthal make of this surge in recent years of Democratic and Republican support for cracking down on allegedly exploitative and illegal practices of big businesses?

“I hope that the cause of antitrust enforcement will be bipartisan,” Blumenthal said. ​“It should be. It’s a matter of serving consumers with better products and more competition.”

Google has said it will appeal Mehta’s ruling. The federal court must now decide what remedy to impose based on its finding that Google is an illegal monopolist.