Google found guilty of antitrust violations, potentially reshaping digital information retrieval in a landmark ruling.
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Google has been found guilty of an antitrust law with its search engine, ruled Monday in court. The tech giant was handed this defeat and will potentially have to reshape how many Americans retrieve information digitally. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reached the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist. And it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in Monday's opinion. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” Google has been spending over the past couple decades billions in exclusive contracts to be the default engine for retrieving information on many different web browsers and smartphones. These contracts have given the edge to Google in the search engine space, compared to competitors who lack market share such as; Bing,Yahoo, ask.com, and DuckDuckGo.
Google's revenue from advertising has continued to increase due to this dominance in the search engine space. Specifically from these exclusive contracts, google continues to increase their traffic and benefit from ad spend by companies. This case has been considered to be one of the biggest tech antitrust cases since the US government's antitrust showdown with Microsoft. The White House called the ruling “a victory for the American people”. With many Americans disappointed time after time seeing big corporations become above the law, Google most certainly is not, seen by the outcome of this case.
