Tech Policy Press - The Google Remedies Turn Landmark Verdicts Into a Whimper
The landmark antitrust trials against Google appear to have ended with a whimper. Over the past two years, federal judges have ruled in separate government cases that Google maintained its monopolies in search and digital advertising tools (or “ad tech”) through improper and illegal methods. (The Open Markets Institute, where I work, filed briefs in support of the government in both matters.) While Google has been a relentlessly competitive firm, its competition, as two judges concluded, has not always been fair.
The judicial remedies, however, have not matched the severity of the offenses. In an order released to the public yesterday, Judge Leonie Brinkema declined to break up Google in the ad tech case by ordering the sale of its digital ad subsidiaries. And so, two jurists have now ruled that Google broke the law and yet refused to take away the company’s dangerous competitive weapons.
Google revolutionized how people search for information on the internet. In the late 1990s, there was an abundance of search engines: remember AltaVista, HotBot, and Lycos? Google joined the scene and quickly distinguished itself. It offered a clean interface and excellent results. Enter a keyword or string into Google and see links to the ten most useful results on page one. It eclipsed its rivals and eventually pushed them to effective irrelevance. Google competed and captured the search market by making a superior tool, becoming an everyday verb in the process.
For a time, it appeared to represent the best of American capitalism. On top of its socially beneficial innovation in search, Google, at first, refused to embrace the surveillance advertising business model that was taking off at the turn of the 21st century. Instead, it made money through contextual ads tied to search queries. Google seemed to be practicing its corporate slogan, “don’t be evil.”
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