Ninety-one percent of people who use search engines — literally any person on Earth — use Google. In comparison, the second most widely-used search engine, Bing, attracts a practically comatose 3.88 percent, according to StatCounter. And that staggering market share, combined with business practices that blocked smaller competitors from seizing larger chunks of the search engine business, is what prompted a federal judge to rule in August that Google is an illegal monopoly.
According to CNN, Google seized its market dominance through exclusive agreements that made it the default search engine on smartphones and browsers. Those agreements, worth tens of billions of dollars, loaded Google onto millions of iPhones and Galaxy phones, while denying search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing the ability to meaningfully compete at all.
In his 277-page ruling for U.S. et al vs. Google, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote, "Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly." He continued that the exclusive agreements that helped Google dominate the market "have given Google access to scale that its rivals cannot match."
Rebecca Haw Allensworth of the Vanderbilt University School of Law said in an interview with the New York Times that the ruling represented an important turning point for antitrust law in the 21st century.
The ruling, issued after a 10-week trial in 2023, does not specify what Google must do to comply with the Sherman Act — Mehta will make that determination in the weeks and months to come. Google plans to appeal the ruling, and if unsuccessful, may be forced to change its business practices or sell off parts of the company. The latter is what happened in the 1980s when the Department of Justice managed to break up AT&T, "Ma Bell," into seven so-called Baby Bells.