There's no question that Google is the dominant internet search engine in the world -- after all, "Googling" has become an accepted verb.
But on Monday, a federal judge concluded that Google has engaged in several illegal practices to maintain that search dominance, and ruled in favor of the Justice Department in an antitrust lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has maintained a monopoly in online search, illegally using its dominant market position to crowd out competitors.
Judge Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling, "After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly."
While Mehta acknowledged that Google's search engine is the best performing on the Internet, he said being best does not justify acting as a monopoly that performs about 90% of the world's Internet searches.
Mehta said in the ruling that Google has spent billions, including more than $26 billion in 2021 alone, on exclusive contracts to secure its position as the default search provider on smartphones and web browsers, blocking out would-be competitors.
The ruling noted that Google "enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices."
"A key component of this case has to do with some of the deals that Google struck with companies like Apple and Samsung to be the default search engine on smartphones. Meaning, if you go buy an iPhone and you do a web search through the Safari web browser, you're going to get a default Google search using that query," explained ABC News tech reporter Mike Dobuski. "It's not impossible to go do a different web search through a company like Bing, for example, but you have to go out of your way to do that, whereas Google is the default and it's easy to get there."
"The Department of Justice in this case pointed to this 90% number as a key part of this, 90% being the amount of web searches that are done through Google, and they use that number to underline their dominant market position. Now, this, according to the judge, amounts to a violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which is illegal," Dobuski added.
Google has argued that people don't use its search engine because of a dominant market position, but that they use Google because it's a really good product. It argues that if users were presented with alternative options like Microsoft's Bing and DuckDuckGo, they would generally choose Google anyway.
"This comes back to the question of not whether Google makes a good product or not, but whether they used their market position to crowd out these competitors," Dobuski said. "These deals took Google's pretty good product, in the judge's estimation, and moved it into the world of something that would be an antitrust concern."
Google plans to appeal the ruling, which could stretch the case out for years.
"This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn't be allowed to make it easily available," Google President Ken Walker said in a statement. "We plan to appeal. As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use."
In the short term, nothing is expected to change for Google users.
"This is just a ruling having to do with liability, not remedies. that decision really is not likely to come until early next year," Dobuski said. "It's certainly possible that Google could be broken up as a result of this. But you talk to legal experts, that's on the extreme end of the potential remedies that could be put forward here. The other end could be something as simple as when you buy a new iPhone and you set up the Safari web browser, you're presented with a choice of what you would like the default search engine to be. And of course, that would apply to Samsung and other phones as well."