Google monopoly slapdown may have come too late
Having found that search engine Google has an illegal monopoly on search, judge Amit Mehta of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia has set the cat among the pigeons. Once the unassailable giant of the Internet that crushed all in its path, Google – led by CEO Sundar Pichai (pictured) – has finally encountered a foe it cannot vanquish: the law.
What actions the government will take against Google, are set to be determined in a second trial, but for now the judgement could not be clearer: “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.”
The consensus is that the finding will not see Google’s parent company Alphabet split up, but that the core of the compliant – Alphabet’s signing exclusive agreements with device makers such as Apple and Samsung that see it pay billions of dollars to ensure Google search engine was the default search engine on phones and tablets – will have consequences, and not just for Google.
Google currently pays Apple $20 billion (approx. €18.3 billion) annually to be the search default in its browser Safari, a figure that amounts to 4% to 6% of Apple’s annual profits. Apple is unlikely to starveif that agreement is revoked as Microsoft has long been clear that it would be happy to pay to have its Bing search engine put in pole position in Safari.
However, read a certain way, Alphabet and Apple are not so much partners as locked in a struggle: Google needs Apple’s users as much as Apple needs Google’s services. As a result, the unwinding of their agreement could have an outsized impact, seeing the cold war between Android and iOS heat up pretty rapidly.
And then there’s artificial intelligence (AI). Since the arrival of ChatGPT there has been a sense that the days of search as a keystone of Internet use could be waning. Rather than querying an index of Web pages, the thinking goes, users will get answers to their questions from AI chatbots.
ChaGPT’s creator OpenAI certainly thinks so. A prototype of its AI-based search tools, currently known as SearchGPT, is now in open proptype and is expected to formally launch this year. AI competitors such as Peplexity have also taken direct aim at search, while a raft of traditional search players, including DuckDuckGo, Brave, Qwant, Ecosia and, of course, Bing are all jockeying to grab even a small portion of lucrative search traffic.
There may already be something significant happening, though.
Complaints that Google’s results have been getting worse have been a familiar theme for years now, and, to be fair, they seem legitimate. On the one hand, Google is clearly pushing more advertising in front of users, but in addition the Internet is filling up with slop – something that has only accelerated with the rise of AI-generated content.
In addition, the Web 2.0 revolution of a decade ago has led to a general decline in the Web as such. Not only have users congregated around large, private platforms – notably but not exclusively social media, and abandoning the open Web – but businesses are increasingly pushing users to apps where they can more effectively harvest data.
None of this is to say that search is dead. Far from it, and enormous profits are still made from it, but more and more of us are using fewer and fewer websites, meaning the search bar is no longer the first thing we see when we go online. For my money, this concentration of attention on a few mega platforms and apps is a real pity and something we should spend a little bit of time searching our souls about.
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