It’s so rare to wake up to good tech news. But on Tuesday morning, coffee in hand, it happened: Google has been declared a monopoly. And while the ruling may feel somewhat late to the party — Google is probably the most obvious monopoly in modern tech, duh! — seeing the official recognition of its illegal monopolistic practices felt like a big win. But how much can it repair the damage that tech behemoths have done to our collective digital life?
Specifically, Judge Mehta ruled in favour of the US Department of Justice (DOJ), finding that Google broke US antitrust laws; building a monopoly over online search and suppressing competition by creating billion-dollar deals with companies like Apple and Samsung to ensure that Google is the default search engine on their devices.
But we can’t celebrate too much just yet and we’re unlikely to feel any difference for quite some time. That’s because the USA v Google ruling is only about liability, not remedies or penalties. That will come later, in a separate trial. Google quickly announced it will appeal the ruling, leaving plenty of opportunity for it to weasel its way out of meaningful consequences, as Microsoft did in the last significant big tech antitrust case over two decades ago.
When the time comes, possible results could be anything from tweaks to business practices, to fines against the company, to breaking Google up entirely (a girl can dream!). But given that the decision revolves so much around Google’s default search agreements, a plausible outcome could be that the judge rules Google can no longer make such contracts.
Hypothetically, that would mean Google could still be the default search engine if companies choose it, but without the multi-billion dollar payments that guarantee it. Ok fine, screw these companies passing big bags of money between each other, right? But one perverse consequence of this would be that Mozilla — the organisation behind open-source and privacy-friendly web browser, Firefox — would suddenly lose 86% of its revenue. That would be a sorry loss (and quite possibly push more people towards Google’s own browser, Chrome), and highlights just how deeply intertwined reliance upon Google has become. It should also give us pause to consider just how far focusing on default search deals can realistically take us.
Most excitingly, this case is just the first of many. The DOJ is also suing Apple for an alleged monopoly over the smartphone market, and Google (again) in a separate challenge regarding its advertising business. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission, led by antitrust expert Lina Khan, is going after Meta and Amazon. Meta’s decision against Google may very well be influential for how other judges decide to apply antitrust law to modern digital markets. Long live antitrust summer.
Throughout the trial, Google argued that it had not acted anti-competitively, but rather that its large market share was the result of its superior product. In an incredible display of hubris, Google’s statement emphasised that the decision “recognises that Google offers the best search engine”. Anyone who has attempted to use Google for information retrieval lately knows this is laughable: it has become insufferably overrun by ads, shopping referral links, and more recently, AI-generated garbage. That’s not just anecdotal; research has shown that Google search results are getting worse.
But Google isn’t just a search engine, it’s an advertising machine. Google’s data-extractive business practices that have flourished under surveillance capitalism are deeply intertwined with its monopolistic power. It’s a kind of cursed symbiosis: the revenue created through data-driven advertising, by far the most profitable arm of its business, (Google made over US$237 billion from ad revenue in 2023) enables it to fund its anti-competitive practices, such as the default search deals, in turn making sure that both consumers and other companies have no real choice. The bigger Google gets, the more data it can generate and monetise. And so the cycle continues, and on and on we spiral downward into the digital trash fire we now find ourselves in.
Aggressive enforcement of antitrust law is an essential component in the fight against big tech, and it is encouraging to see US regulators seek to put it to use. They have a tough job, fighting not just the tech titans but also politicians who wish to maintain global US tech hegemony. But antitrust alone won’t be enough. We also need to put a stopper in the flow of data that fuels so many of the harmful consequences of digital platforms. For the larger project of dismantling surveillance capitalism, we will need to use all the tools we have.
Ultimately, a “more competitive” technology sector that remains tied to an ideology of ruthless growth, commodification and exploitation under surveillance capitalism will not solve the big-picture problems we face. It’s time to get serious about collective ownership of the digital commons and the information ecosystem, reimagine data as a public good, and unshackle technological innovation from the corruptive forces of venture capitalism and the free market.
