The big news this week is a landmark ruling in the US which declared that Google is officially a search engine monopoly. And the judge wasn’t shy about calling them out, adding “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”

That’s a big deal, because for the past 25 years there hasn’t been a single significant ruling against big tech companies that curbed their market-dominating behaviours in any meaningful way.

The ruling came from a lawsuit where the US Department of Justice sued Google for using its position to pay billions of dollars to companies like Apple and Mozilla to make its search engine the default option in their products. Yes, technically you can go into your iPhone or browser settings to switch your default search engine, but does anyone actually do that? The court found that over 95% of all mobile search happens on Google, and for desktop the number is just above 90%.

Google’s Defence

Google says their search engine is just better, and that may be true — in fact, the judge agreed. He found that, yes, Google has the best search engine, but that has only been made possible because they have the most search volume, which creates the most revenue, which they can then reinvest to continue to improve the quality of their search results.

You may be thinking, isn’t that just capitalism? All of the best companies get rewarded for great products which then allow them to spend on developing even better products. While that is generally how it works, in this case, Google has used their power to create an unfair market where no one else is able to compete. For example: Would you invest in a startup search engine company right now?

Despite all of that, some companies, like Neeva, have shown promise. It was started by the former head of Google Ads who set out to create a better, more private and personalized search experience. After some early traction, Neeva was forced to sell its tech to an insurance company because there was just no way to convince millions of people to manually change their search engine every time that they wanted to find something online.

So What?

The court hasn’t yet delivered its ruling on what the remedy will be, but a few options could include:

  1. Banning the practice of paying for default position
  2. The introduction of a menu of search engine options on our phones and browsers
  3. Restricting Google from placing its own content at the top of search results
  4. Forcing Alphabet to separate its Chrome, search engine, and Android businesses, which would mean they’d have to stop sharing data with each other

Whatever the court decides, it will take years for those ruling to be implemented, but there will likely be some immediate impacts from the decision:

  1. Startups and investors will see this as a sign that competition will be allowed, which will likely inspire some new search engines to launch
  2. Competitors like Bing and DuckDuckGo will get more aggressive about taking market share from Google
  3. Google will be less likely to push its own content, which may cause more searches to include organic results that take the user to non-Google websites

To learn more about the biggest digital marketing court decision in decades, check out: