The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it was launching an antitrust lawsuit against Google alleging that the search giant’s deals with browser and operating system developers to make Google a default search engine amounted to anticompetitive behavior. The suit bears all the hallmarks of a political stunt—an unnecessary government intervention in the online search market that has little chance of yielding any meaningful benefit to consumers.
Oddly, the suit does not target Google’s dominance in the online advertising space, which has often been the focus of critics, but Internet searches, where it seems least plausible to claim the company enjoys anything like a monopoly. Internet users have a wide variety of easily‐accessible options for online searches: While Google is the default search engine for most browsers and mobile operating systems in the United States, users can elect to use competitors such as Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo with almost no effort, either by manually visiting those pages, or by taking a few seconds to change their default engine settings. Though Google commands the lion’s share of search traffic, it is hard to seriously claim this is because consumers lack for choices—which would normally be a precondition of claiming a company enjoys a “monopoly.”
Just as Google itself rapidly displaced many older search engines like AltaVista and AskJeeves—which had become defaults for users in the 1990s—the company would quickly lose its dominant position if most users found that competitors yielded more relevant results, just as users routinely download and install apps that provide superior functionality to those already installed on their devices. Moreover, Google’s arrangements with operating system and browser developers are not materially different from, or more “anticompetitive” than, analogous deals for prominent product placement in stores familiar from brick‐and‐mortar markets. Indeed, those arrangements may produce consumer benefits by subsidizing the production of software that is free to the user. Nor is it credible to claim, as DOJ does that Google has established a stranglehold on search defaults by dint of its deep pockets: Its primary rival in competitive bids to be “default search engine” is the not‐exactly‐penurious Microsoft.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/searching-monopolies
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