After a nine-month trial, a US judge has found Google guilty of anti-competitive practices through its numerous agreements to impose its search engine on smartphones and computers.
American giant Google has suffered a huge legal setback. Although the company already plans to appeal, the ruling is historic and will certainly affect American technology companies. Until recently, these companies enjoyed a degree of laxity from the United States. But recently that has changed. Washington wants to tighten the reins around Big Tech so that the technological landscape as we know it today could evolve forcibly.
The US court ruled that the Mountain View-based company benefited from a dominant position in the market and abused its considerable financial resources to secure its throne by making deals with brands such as Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to crush competition.
Indeed, Google has for years offered significant sums of money – billions of dollars in Apple’s case – to make its search engine the default on their devices and Internet browsers.
“Google’s distribution agreements lock up a substantial part of the search market and reduce the opportunities for competition,” said Federal Judge Amit Mehta, who handled the case, according to The Verge.
Currently, the US judge has ruled only on Google’s culpability. No sanction has yet been imposed to resolve the issue. We will probably have to wait until the end of the appeal process Google has launched before the judge issues his ruling. This could take months, even years. And the sanctions could take different forms:
In the most extreme case, the US judge could simply force Alphabet to split up its operations. On one side there would be a new independent company with the search engine Google and on the other Alphabet with its empire, including Android and Chrome.
The courts could force Google to share its search results so that they are usable through other search engines. In this way, alternatives could become more efficient, allowing for better competition in the marketplace.
Finally, the United States could take inspiration from what the European Union has already achieved and force Google to give users on Android the choice of default search engine.
The European Commission is also closely watching Google and its possible dominance in the European market. It could be inspired by Judge Mehta’s ruling to make its own judgment on the company, as well as the sanctions it will impose.
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