Tech Desk
Aug 06, 2024
Google has been hit with a major legal blow as the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has ruled against the search giant in an antitrust lawsuit regarding payments to ensure its prominence on certain devices.
The federal judge, Amit Mehta said that the search giant has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act as the ruling was finalised on August 5, 2024, after being in court for four years.
The antitrust lawsuit was brought against Google in 2020 that alleged Google has a monopolistic attitude in promoting the Google search.
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The Sherman Act is an antitrust law outlawing monopolistic business practices."The act was designed to restore competition, but it was loosely worded and failed to define such critical terms as "trust," "combination," "conspiracy," and "monopoly,” as described by The National Archives.
The lawsuit indicates the DOJ sued Google over several actions including paying browsers, carriers, and mobile phone manufacturers to stay the most visible search engine on the web.
Moreover, it was reported that Google has also paid Apple $26 billion to remain the default search engine in the company’s web browser and devices.
Such contracts helped give Google global scale and also helped block other search engines like Microsoft's Bing or the privacy engine DuckDuckGo from gaining better standing.
The court’s official ruling goes against Google calling it a monopolist in action and attitude as it has broken the law by attempting to maintain the default position in mobile phone browsers.
It's important to note that Google might likely be appealing to the US District Court of Appeal, however, the court may also require Google to make significant changes in its search engine strategy after the lawsuit.
