After two years of pre-trial litigation, and a year of trial in front of U.S. District Judge Amit Mehtata, the court has determined that Google is factually a monopoly operation in the business of online search engine use and advertising. Google is violating section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act by running a monopoly business model.
The court highlighted the results of Judge Mehtata review in a 286-page opinion – SEE HERE. A key excerpt is provided below:
COURT RULING pdf – […] “Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions. The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.
But Google also has a major, largely unseen advantage over its rivals: default distribution. Most users access a general search engine through a browser (like Apple’s Safari) or a search widget that comes preloaded on a mobile device. Those search access points are preset with a “default” search engine. The default is extremely valuable real estate.
Because many users simply stick to searching with the default, Google receives billions of queries every day through those access points. Google derives extraordinary volumes of user data from such searches. It then uses that information to improve search quality. Google so values such data that, absent a user-initiated change, it stores 18 months-worth of a user’s search history and activity.
The distribution agreements benefit Google in another important way. More users mean more advertisers, and more advertisers mean more revenues. As queries on Google have grown, so too has the amount it earns in advertising dollars. In 2014, Google booked nearly $47 billion in advertising revenue. By 2021, that number had increased more than three-fold to over $146 billion. Bing, by comparison, generated only a fraction of that amount—less than $12 billion in 2022.
For years, Google has secured default placements through distribution contracts. It has entered into such agreements with browser developers, mobile device manufacturers, and wireless carriers. These partners agree to install Google as the search engine that is delivered to the user right out of the box at key search access points.
Google pays huge sums to secure these preloaded defaults. Usually, the amount is calculated as a percentage of the advertising revenue that Google generates from queries run through the default search access points. This is known as “revenue share.” In 2021, those payments totaled more than $26 billion. That is nearly four times more than all of Google’s other search-specific costs combined.
In exchange for revenue share, Google not only receives default placement at the key search access points, but its partners also agree not to preload any other general search engine on the device. Thus, most devices in the United States come preloaded exclusively with Google. These distribution deals have forced Google’s rivals to find other ways to reach users.
Google’s dominance eventually attracted the attention of antitrust enforcers—the U.S. Department of Justice and nearly every state’s Attorney General. They homed in on Google’s distribution agreements and in late 2020 filed two separate lawsuits alleging that the agreements and certain other conduct violate Section 2 of the Sherman Act. According to their complaints, Google has unlawfully used the distribution agreements to thwart competition and maintain its monopoly in the market for general search services and in various online advertising markets.
The proceedings that followed have been remarkable. Discovery began in December 2020 and concluded in March 2023.
[…] 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. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
Specifically, the court holds that (1) there are relevant product markets for general search services and general search text ads; (2) Google has monopoly power in those markets; (3) Google’s distribution agreements are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects; and (4) Google has not offered valid procompetitive justifications for those agreements. Importantly, the court also finds that Google has exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive prices for general search text ads. That conduct has allowed Google to earn monopoly profits.” (read more)
This is only one facet to the Google monopoly enterprise. There are other lawsuits challenging the Advertising rules and regulations enforced by Google that block funds from online content providers. Google is a leftist control operation, with comprehensive totalitarian alignment.
Don’t think that our U.S. Government is against this monopoly just because they were forced to respond to it with a lawsuit. DHS and the IC love having a single control point they can exploit and compromise. Monopolies are useful for the interests of the government who corrupts and utilizes them.
Within the Public/Private Technocracy system that Barack Obama helped to build between Big Tech and Government, they both collaborate on the benefits of singular power structures. A pox on all of them!
MSM – Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said the company intends to appeal Mehta’s findings.
“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” Walker said.
For now, the decision vindicates antitrust regulators at the Justice Department, which filed its lawsuit nearly four years ago while Donald Trump was still president, and has been escalating it efforts to rein in Big Tech’s power during President Joe Biden’s administration.
“This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law. The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce our antitrust laws.”
The case depicted Google as a technological bully that methodically has thwarted competition to protect a search engine that has become the centerpiece of a digital advertising machine that generated nearly $240 billion in revenue last year. Justice Department lawyers argued that Google’s monopoly enabled it to charge advertisers artificially high prices while also enjoying the luxury of not having to invest more time and money into improving the quality of its search engine — a lax approach that hurt consumers. (MORE)
Google lost!
Good!
Google is the devil.
They have been scrubbing anything bad about Biden and Harris around this election time. Searches on Bidenflation and high costs under him which used to show up, have disappeared under the same search terms.
Memory Hoard the Right.
Memory Hole the Left.
Stuck in the middle again….
Use Yandex. It finds everything that Google scrubbed.
Isn’t Yandex’s parent company Russian owned Yandex LLC?
Whoever owned it recently sold it. All I know is I get better results in searches than the multiple pages of MSM links I get from google, bing, yahoo, brave, DuckDuckGo, or Startpage.
And I have dropped all the bogeyman fears that people try to ascribe to anything “Russian”.
Thanks for responding.
Re “Whoever owned it recently sold it.”
Here’s a little more about that>>> Yandex search engine sold in $5.2 billion deal (searchengineland.com)
Re “All I know is I get better results in searches than the multiple pages of MSM links I get from google, bing, yahoo, brave, DuckDuckGo, or Startpage.”
Good to know, thanks. I’ve used all those, mostly Startpage; but it doesn’t seem as good as it once did.
Re “And I have dropped all the bogeyman fears that people try to ascribe to anything ‘Russian’.”
I totally agree with your position on that; especially, in reference to Ukraine. Putin is definitely not the bad guy there. Still, Russia is not exactly 100% pro-America either; and bears keeping an eye on along with entities owned by Russia. That’s all I meant by my question, and I thought since you’re familiar with Yandex, which I had never heard of before your comment, you might be better informed about the Russia/Yandex connection than I am.
Actually I know a lot about it but I usually play dumb when I don’t know someone’s biases regarding things Russian or whatever. You seemed to be focused on the Russian ownership so I suspected that was more important to you than the effectiveness of the search engine. If I was wrong then mea culpa.
But I stand by my opinion about its anti-MSM bias. Now that may be a deliberate bias built into its algorithm. But it lets me find other sources of information outside of the mainstream media.
Like any search engine, you have to play with it for awhile in order to learn how to arrange your search strings.
Does Yandex have an AI prompt like Google and others?
I have never logged into yandex (only use it as an unregistered user) and have never seen an AI option.
Somebody’s been watching the water boy 🤔🤣
Spawn of. As I just alluded in a comment, Micro$oft set the standard 3 decades ago.
You’re off by an additional 2 decades! Microsoft is 50 years old! The IBM/Microsoft deal that made them giants is almost 40+ years old now!
From Pirates of the Silicon Valley from the mid-1990’s.
Have been with DuckDuck Go for a few years & very pleased.
Enforcing existing laws? Wow.
“No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law.” Except the United States of America, Incorporated.
Glenn Greenwald did a segment last
night on the Google ruling!
Worth watching.
Massive Loss for Google After Court Rules It’s An Illegal Monopoly with Antitrust Expert Matt Stoller; The U.S. Faces Multiple Crises: Who is Running the Government?; Top Dem Warned That Congress Will Ban Trump If He Wins | SYSTEM UPDATE #311 ☝️ ☝️ ☝️ ☝️ ☝️ ☝️ ☝️ ☝️ ☝️ ☝️
I remember being told back in the USAF’s cyber officer training course that Google was the single best hacking tool available to the USG, for various reasons. And that was fifteen year ago. I have no doubt the IC is in bed with them. The question is, what did Google do to get this kind of ruling leveled against it?
I suspect this is just a control feature the government is holding over google….the govt. is using the law as ultimate control….it has nothing to do with protecting us.
The suit began under PDJT.
Google is the most dangerous, far-left, anti-democratic company in the world. A corporate cult.
I still remember some Zoom meeting they held that was exposed – I think it was of their board of directors? Or just in-house top management maybe.
Whichever – They were openly plotting how to attack and stop PDJT.
A Corporate “cry” session with management and staff after Trump beat Hillary. A lot of employees were wearing “beanie’ hats with propellers.
It takes 30 seconds change your browser search engine on an IPhone. The decision is beyond absurd!
Can you imagine the shear absurdity of Microsoft in a Washington courtroom telling a Democrat DC Judge from India that Google is a monopoly?
By the way Bing is absolutely horrible and Microsoft preloads Bing on every desktop and laptop with a Microsoft operating system which is 90% of the market.
You don’t have to be a fan of Google to see the hypocrisy and corruption coming from Federal Judge Metha who by the way loves throwing J6 Protestors in federal prison for 10 years on a regular basis!
It is easy to change the browser, in any device.
BUT, that’s not the issue.
The main issue is how Google has amassed a breathtakingly broad swath of products which work quite well together by using its financial muscle and closed ownership of its database. This has the effect of slowing down R&D of competing products and alternate options… the very definition of a monopoly!
The ruling is correct.
(sorry did not mean to reply to you, deleted)
And, don’t the few biggies, Goggle, Faceplant etc. have such a reputation for buying up (and then squashing) any new, innovative startups, that THAT is now the goal of the creators; NOT to “be the next Google” but to get just big enough that Goggle or one of the threatened big boys, will buy them out?
In the Elon Musk biography by Ashlee Vance (recommend for some insight) the fact is touched on with the X (Musk’s payment platform which he wanted to grow to more banking services – this was before the iPhone!) and PayPal conflict. They merged and Elon was the CEO. They (Thiel) forced him out in a coup while he was flying to Australia.
PayPal sold to eBay. While they cashed in, they would have been far better off holding onto PayPal.
I think that experience is why Elon prefers to have control. I think he wished he had taken Tesla private.
The ruling will be overturned in the Supreme Court. Being successful and building the best product is Capitalism at it’s best.
The Bolshevik DOJ was smart to file the lawsuit in Washington DC instead of San Francisco where it would have been laughed out of court!
Consumers are free to choose any browser they want. There is no monopoly.
If consumers are free to choose any browser they want, then why don’t the devices come loaded with a menu choices from which the consumer may select? Because Google pays up front to eliminate choices. That’s monopoly inducement.
People are not idiots and the other choices are easily downloaded.
Not idiots, but ignorant and lazy.
That article was talking about the separate search function, not the in-browser search.
Yes, pretty much any browser’s default search engine can be changed – although not necesaarily everywhere in said browser. As I mentioned before, if a New Tab page has a search box embedded in it, most of the time that default cannot be changed.
I have Brave and new tabs default to Brave search.
Yes Brave is one of the few exceptions.
For some time now, Brave doesn’t seem to do much better than Google at finding anything against the government narrative (which of course is most of what I’m searching for.) I think Yandex is still good, might be some others but I forget their names.
I came to that conclusion awhile back. That’s why I searched for a new search engine that had zero relationship to Google or any other Big Tech corporation or group of investors.
I tried Swisscows but results weren’t all that different from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, yahoo, or others – too many MSM sources in the first pages of results and very few or no alternative media sources in the first 10 pages of results…
But when I tried Yandex I got hits right up front on the first page that countered the MSM sources’ false narratives. Especially on politically-charged search strings ….
That’s good to know. Thank GB.
Yep, I like it.
I think it was on here that someone mentioned perplexity for search. I’ve been trying it the last few days and am getting use to the AI type curated responses. It seems to have fair, do not sell PI, terms. It does of course say government can get access.
https://www.perplexity.ai/
I am honestly surprised that the Obama/Obama DOJ didn’t squash the lawsuit in early 2020.
And you read that right, it’s not a typo because Obama has been running the show and we all know it.
Obviously, as bad as Google, Facebook and Apple are the Democrats don’t think they are bad enough and want more control of them.
That’s what this is about! It has nothing to do with the consumer!
Bingo …
So,Jobama now morphs into Jomalla, lol..and no, we don’t all know it.
There are a group of us who maintain Obama was a creation of the I/C, and just a figurehead, much like Joe and KH, he didn’t really run anything, and no he hasn’t since leaving office, either.
He IS a convenient lightning rod, for them to erect to draw all of the animosity, while they continue to operate behind the scenes.
And no, Michelle has no interest in getting back in the WH, and neither does BO, as its not really that enjoyable, to be a powerless figurehead.
Well said. I think they are all creations of the ic. Maybe they represent as mouthpieces different
factions. But they really are nobodies. Trump included.
Pres. Trump included??? Please do share.
“DHS and the IC love having a single control point they can exploit and compromise. Monopolies are useful for the interests of the government who corrupts and utilizes them. Within the Public/Private Technocracy system that Barack Obama helped to build between Big Tech and Government, they both collaborate on the benefits of singular power structures.”
Twenty First Century Fascism, where nationalism has been replaced by corporatism. Not your grandpa’s fascism, but fascism nonetheless.
Sinclair Lewis was right. Again.
It’s reverse or corporate fascism.
Instead of the government dictating to the businesses, the businesses (corporations) are dictating to the government (along with significantly grea$ing the governments palms..).
I really think the IC rules it all META GOOGLE and MICROSOFT might be able to call in a hit But only the alphabets can call it in and make it disappear as Bill Gates said when questioned about Epstein, ” well he’s dead in general you always have to be careful” you could taste the fear.
I don’t believe corporates are calling the shots. Its the guys with the ability to F you up 6 ways to Sunday that have all the guns and call the shots. WEF launches trial balloons and keeps the bankers in line.
Its not pay to play It play or PAY
“I don’t believe corporates are calling the shots.”
Then you’ve not been paying attention. But I don’t believe that. You surely are familiar with the Military Industrial Complex? What do you think makes it something that President Eisenhower warned us about?
Do you know who runs the Federsl Reserve? (It’s not the federal government).
How big is Blackwater?
Do you think any of the huge corporations that own the media, the defense mfg. business, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, etc. all let the federal government tell THEM what they can and can’t do?
They’ve bought and paid for the Congress and most of the regulatory agencies multiple times over. Sometimes indirectly via the US Chamber of Commerce; sometimes via the many big PACs.
Those corporations – via their lobbyists – write the bills that become legislation that gets passed and becomes law! Sundance has explained this multiple times over the years.
As TwoLaine elsewhere noted…. since the breakup of AT&T, which worked fine, monopolies have been allowed to grow again and surpass the reach of AT&T and Standard Oil.
Today, the “entertainment”, “news” and “user software” fields have become monopolies and/or rackets (per the definition of RICO). Cable and wireless carriers too are borderline rackets.
Yet, the Government uses them to their own advantage and to our detriment… the Tech Oligarchs, naturally, go along because they are getting RICH out of it.
I’m actually amazed that the DOJ allowed this lawsuit to come to this…. and I do wonder what will happen when this goes into appeals.
On the technical side, Google has done quite well, but elsewhere it has gotten too strong. It used financial muscle to force control…. to a level that Apple can only dream.
The Google database, Alpha, should be a stand alone product, provided for a charge to anyone that develops a search engine. The Chrome browser and search engines should also be a stand alone products and ANY and ALL hardware projects should stay in separate companies.
Follow the Internet model where everything was provided in the open for review and then an open infrastructure was created ( it is very nice… ).
What we need now is for the RICO laws to be applied elsewhere. Start with the Mainstream
MediaPropaganda Machine….Funny thing, I’m on a trip and typing this on my HP Chromebook which for 200 bucks from Costco is a really good deal. But, I don’t use the Google search engine.
When it comes to Big Media, there are special laws applying directly to media, that can be applied.
Congress passed legislation limiting the % of media ownership in any media market.
Media ownership includes Television stations, Radio Stations and Newspapers.
However, it delegated the details to the FCC, to detirmine what the max. % of such ownership would be allowed.
In the period when we saw the conglomeration of media, if you go back and look, the FCC just gradually raised the %, to accomodate the big 6 Media companies.
They never blocked the purchase, or ordered them to seel off aquired assets, which the law gives them authority to do.
Corporate Capture in action,…
“Special laws” derive from the Communications Act of 1934, when FDR decided that the government “owned” the electromagnetic spectrum, and could decide who could use it and for what purpose. Got extended to cover the concept of Community Antennas, where a town could put up an antenna to receive signals from distant cites, then distribute that signal to its residents, known as CATV and later “cable”.
FCC dudes been paid very very good
Whoever controls who is done with the most money
NOT JUST mobile. For the past many years, at least 3/4 of major browsers (for Windows/Linux etc) come packaged with google as the default. And on several of those browser variations, the default search engine on a new tab screen cannot be changed.
“The default is extremely valuable real estate.” Most definitely. In ths case it’s Google learning from Micro$oft, which should have LOST that antitrust suit way back in 2000. But same old story, money talks and the guilty walk. And companies like M$ and Google don’t even worry about the money.
Well I suppose Edge defaults to Bing, and I object more to how search in Windows takes you to bing/copilot much more than browser configuration, at least in Firefox I have no problem selecting various search providers.
This is a not-so-veiled threat from garland directed at google. The DOJ is open to settlement under certain circumstances. “Nice monopoly you have there…shame if your company had to be broken up…better rathet up that censorship of Conservatives.”
= KGB.
Needless to say, but I “said” it anyway.
Elon: “There may also be criminal liability via the RICO Act.”
—
“Rumble has joined
@X to sue a cartel of advertisers and ad agencies who conspired to block ad revenue from going to certain platforms and content creators….
My web browser has a feature where it can block connections to web addresses that contain malicious content. It does this by sending every IP address used to a central clearing house that examines the IP. This central clearing house just happens to be GOOGLE who records every connection.
(I uncheck this box in by browser, but I am suspicious that GOOGLE still gets my information.)
There are some pretty severe criminal penalties and fines under 15USC, for each instance and for every person involved. This might become interesting.
No one at Google will end up in jail, period.
Fined, yes. But look at that as tech wealth redistribution and/or paying the FIB/ICA/etc for the past decades of protection and access.
What’s missing from this is the punishment. Even if they lose at the end game, they will pay the leftist government $Bs and that communist regime will use it for censorship and declare google to not be a monopoly they will have to censor more. See how that works. And I bet Google will be more than happy to do both
I first noticed Google’s evil lying conduct back in 2009 when “climategate” UK whistleblower emails were released on a Russian obscure site.
Because of its obscurity it was slow getting views and every day I would check the numbers. It got up to the millions and then suddenly dropped back and went in reverse!
As mostly computer nerds were following the story it was soon noticed and people began to call out Google. Caught in the act Google gave a weak excuse and reversed the numbers back.
I have never trusted Google since however it does have the best search engine thanks to its throttling the rest so I use it along with others.
I don’t know if people realize this or not, or maybe they don’t know, but Google, Meta, Facebook, and many many other companies are partners with WEF. If you go to WEF’s website & use the “Partners” tab, there is an A-Z directory. Some I knew of, some I didn’t. Over 3 years ago, due to the censorship of Facebook & Amazon I cancelled my accounts with them, as I didn’t want to be supporting WEF as much as I could possibly accomplish, & their crazy nefarious plans, so I made notes…
Google and elections interference : Question : How much have they spread their tentacles in place concerning US 2024 elections?
MPs summon Google CEO to Ottawa for blocking news access for some Canadians
OTTAWA – The CEO and other top executives of Google are being summoned to appear before a parliamentary committee after the company decided to temporarily block some Canadians from accessing news through its search engine.
They are expected to testify at a meeting of the House of Commons heritage committee on yesterday.
The committee is also requesting documents related to Google’s news ban.
A Google spokesperson did not answer questions on (Tuesday), saying only that the company will be responding directly to the committee.
Google confirmed to The Canadian Press last week that it is running a short-lived test to limit access to news on its search engine for less than four per cent of Canadian users, in response to the Liberal government’s proposed Online News Act.
Bill C-18 would require digital giants such as Google to negotiate deals that would compensate Canadian media companies for linking to or otherwise repurposing their content online.
“It’s troubling that Google was doing this in secret, but was caught by the press,” Liberal MP Chris Bittle said to the committee. His motion to summon the Google executives was unanimously supported by opposition MPs.
“It’s important for Parliament to take a look and see what Google is doing. I don’t particularly like their track record on this.”
The summons applies to CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as Kent Walker, president of global affairs, Richard Gingras, vice-president of news, and Sabrina Geremia, vice president and country manager for Google in Canada.
The House of Commons doesn’t have the power to summon individuals who live outside of Canada, but members of Parliament who serve on the committee want to take the chance.
Should the four individuals not show up, the House of Commons can enforce the summons if they ever step foot in Canada.
Larger media companies have praised the online news bill, saying it will create a level playing field with Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, which compete with news outlets for advertising dollars.
Tech companies and the Conservatives have pushed back against the bill, arguing it is the wrong approach to enhance journalism. Google has said it would rather pay Canadian media outlets through a monetary fund than be regulated by the government.
It’s become common for tech giants to respond to government bills that could affect their platforms by altering their products.
Google previously shut down its news service in Spain for eight years after a rule forced the company and other news aggregators to pay publishers for using snippets of their news. They reopened the service last year.
In December, the company removed snippets, thumbnails and video previews in Google Search and Google News in Czechia, in response to a copyright law the country had introduced.
In 2021, when Australia introduced a law similar to Canada’s Bill C-18, Meta temporarily blocked news from Facebook.
Meta has previously threatened to do the same in Canada, but the company has said it has not made any changes to its services in this country “at this time.”
Meta is opposed to the Online News Act, saying it does not make significant money from news content.
Note :
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 28, 2023.
SOURCE : https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/mps-summon-google-ceo-to-ottawa-for-blocking-news-access-for-some-canadians-1.6292105
“Google is a leftist control operation, with comprehensive totalitarian alignment.
Don’t think that our U.S. Government is against this monopoly just because they were forced to respond to it with a lawsuit. DHS and the IC love having a single control point they can exploit and compromise. Monopolies are useful for the interests of the government who corrupts and utilizes them.”
For years I’ve stated that google was created by our own government (which branch , I know not) just as CNN was created by our own government (which branch, I now not) both with the mission of control; one to control our minds and one to watch what we search for. This was pure speculation on my part but I was recently vindicated by the posts of Michael Benz who was the first to say what I’ve said with a platform.
The CNN angle hauntingly occurred to me from a memory years after the original Gulf wars. All the news agencies at the time and there was only ABC, NBC, CBS no Fox yet (?) had to use the new cable network CNN’s film footage to air the bombs and missiles traveling down chimneys to blow up targets. But somehow only CNN knew where to plave the cameras to capture all the action. No one else had a clue. News Anchor Peter Jennings then had to admit on air, “CNN, the little network that could.” So how could CNN know where to put the cameras? Only if they had intelligence insight, insight they would have if they were, say the CIA changing their on air appearance name to “CNN”. And Google, another of their bastard children.
Let boogle deal with your ecommerce and junk mail…almost every server provide free email for private correspondence.
At last some good news!
I quit using Google a few years ago & am delighted to see the decision.
Perhaps this endless viper will finally be mincemeat.
Google is computer trash.
Google has politically Woke rigged its search engine.