After a US judge ruled that Google acted illegally to maintain its monopoly over online searches, questions also arose about what will happen to the tech giant and to what extent its users will turn to alternatives.
The Google monopoly ruling could have consequences, but not soon. PHOTO Shutterstock
The tech world is still processing a US judge’s potentially seismic ruling that Google illegally holds a monopoly on online search and related advertising, according to the BBC.
After the company was sued by the US Department of Justice in 2020 for controlling about 90% of the online search market, it took four years to reach that decision, but the legal process will continue for a while, given Google’s owner Alphabet’s inevitable appeal to the court’s solution.
However, the potential consequences of the decision are taken into account, ranging from cash fines to more complicated remedies (coercive measures).
The US government wants “structural remedial measures” in relation to Google’s online search monopoly, which the judge ruled to be illegal.
The biggest impact would be if it required Google to break itself into smaller pieces – a measure US officials have not ruled out, according to the BBC.
Google, much more than a simple search
An example would be Android, a firm he bought for $50m (£39.3m) in 2005, which now runs on most smartphones – or YouTube, a £1.65bn acquisition dollars in 2006, which now generates huge revenue every year.
If the remedial measures were directed in these directions, the Search Engine itself would be turned into a separate business from these companies of the company.
Such a measure would not be to the liking of Alphabet executives, according to the BBC analysis, which states, however, that as long as Google remains the default search engine on devices, the average consumer is unlikely to notice the difference.
Another potential remedy takes aim at Google’s practice of paying other companies to use Google.
The US government showed in court that Google currently pays firms like Apple more than $10 billion a year to be preinstalled as the default search engine on their devices or platforms, and the judge agreed.
If Google hadn’t spent that money, big companies might have been encouraged to develop their own search experience.
In contrast, Apple’s Safari browser uses Google by default whenever the user searches the Internet.
The establishment of a Google rival, one of the possible consequences of some corrective measures against the tech giant
It begs the question of what would happen if the remedies would significantly affect Google’s ability to pay other companies to use it. One of those answers is that these companies might set up a rival.
If users were given a choice, it would be easy to imagine some sort of choice screen where people opening a browser for the first time would be asked if they wanted to use Google or an alternative like Microsoft’s Bing.
According to the BBC, it’s harder to imagine that this will cause people to abandon Google en masse, simply because most users think it works well.
The effects, if any, will not appear anytime soon
Past experience suggests that whatever happens next, it won’t happen anytime soon.
For example, in 1999, Microsoft was in a very similar situation to what Google is in now. A US judge then concluded that the firm had created a monopoly, and a year later a court ordered the firm dissolved.
But Microsoft appealed the decision, and in 2001 the original termination decision was overturned, and by the end of 2002, Microsoft reached a settlement with the US Department of Justice, which a judge accepted.
Certain US states did not agree, so it was not until 2004, five years after the initial decision, that the agreement was officially signed.
