The big technology companies try to baffle outsiders with complexity. So it took almost four years for a US federal court to conclude the antitrust case against Google brought by the US Department of Justice. But having trawled through millions of pages of submissions, 3,500 exhibits and dozens of witness testimonies, the conclusion reached by Judge Amit Mehta this week was one of stark simplicity: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
Those words will reverberate throughout the global digital economy as lawyers scramble to understand their implications. “Not a single word of statute has changed but we now have a fundamental change in the antitrust landscape for companies all around the world,” Michelle Meagher, a senior fellow at SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, tells me. “This is stunning.”
What the practical impact of Mehta’s 286-page ruling will be, however, is another question and we await the court’s remedies. Google said it would first appeal against the judgment. Its initial response, dripping with sarcasm, sketched out its likely defence. “The decision recognises that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” said Kent Walker, president of global affairs at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.