Google is 0 for 2 in antitrust trials. What will it take to get through the Play? A U.S. District judge Amit Mehta
The company is 0 for 2 in antitrust trials. United States District judge Amit Mehta ruled on Monday that Google has unlawfully maintained its dominance in search by using anticompetitive deals to keep rivals from gaining traction. And without fear of pressure from competitors, Google has been able to charge whatever it wants for search ads, he said.
The fact that the search business has grown over the past 26 years to an annual revenue of $175 billion is arguably the most comprehensive modern examination of the business. Google will appeal, as it risks losing its prominent placement on iPhones and other gateways to the web.
Garland called the decision an historic win. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter said it “paves the path for innovation for generations to come.”
In light of the judgments in San Francisco and Washington, there are no known ways in which Google will have to adjust its business. Mehta will hold a separate trial to look at remedies for the search case, and a judge is going to consider proposed penalties in the Play litigation. The changes that have been costly are in response to antitrust scrutiny.
Mehta ruled that there is only one dominant player in both general search and general search text ads. He found that the deals with partners harm competition and that the company had not shown that they did not harm competition.
Google and the plaintiffs will spar over how severe its penalty should be, presenting experts and written testimony before Mehta issues another opinion and order. It’s not known what the exact timeline is. A former Federal Trade Commission chair and a professor at George Washington University tells The Verge that he expects the remedies process to last for several years, including a weeklong hearing by Judge Mehta this year.
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, an antitrust professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, expects a fight that could take up to a year. “There’s going to be gnashing of teeth over the remedy, and that is going to make it take a long time,” Allensworth says.
A milder remedy is a court-ordered injunction that would prohibit the conduct the court found to be improper. But even that includes changes that could range from trivial to seismic. Mehta could demand Google modify its multibillion-dollar deals with companies like Apple and Mozilla, for instance, which cement it as the default search engine on products like the iPhone.
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