Google Is Big. Is That Bad?

NO ONE HAS A MONOPOLY ON THE DEFINITION OF A MONOPOLY.

- DAMON ROOT

"THIS VICTORY AGAINST Google is an historic win for the American people." So declared U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in response to District Judge Amit Mehta's August 5, 2024, ruling in United States v. Google, which found the tech giant guilty of amassing and wielding illegal monopoly power over the online search market.

What Garland left unsaid was that the ruling was also a win for his boss, President Joe Biden, and for his boss's predecessor, former President Donald Trump. That's because the federal case against Google did not originate with the Biden Justice Department; it originated with the Trump Justice Department. "Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet," the Trump administration argued in its original 2020 lawsuit. "That Google is long gone. The Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet." In an increasingly polarized political climate, the Google ruling was hailed as a rare triumph for bipartisanship. At last, the thinking went, the two parties can finally agree on something.

Yet the ruling was not uniformly celebrated among legal and policy experts. Mehta's judgment "may not hold up on appeal," argued Alden Abbott, former general counsel at the Federal Trade Commission. Instead of harming consumers, Abbott wrote, Google's search engine "likely raised consumer welfare, which the Supreme Court has deemed the overarching goal of antitrust enforcement." Nor did the ruling give much weight to consumer choice, effectively ignoring the actions of the many consumers who have opted to use Google search precisely because they view it as the best product around.