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.
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