It was always going to be an awkward time for the government to sue Google as a "monopoly" in the world of online search. The first antitrust case brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) against Google in late 2020 was predicated on the idea that the company had cornered the market using profit-sharing agreements and coercive tactics with third parties to make Google what it is today: a verb, used by everyday people to describe an online search.
Predictable of most government cases, this came a bit late as Google's market position is more tenuous than ever.
This week's remedy ruling by the U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rolled back some of the worst possible outcomes for Google in its monopoly case and laid bare just how strong competition in the search engine space really is. Mehta tossed out the DOJ's radical call for Google to break off from its Chrome browser but maintained that the company must share its search data with competitors like Bing, Safari, DuckDuckGo, and Firefox.
