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There is so much I dislike about Google’s left-wing advocacy that writing this piece is difficult. However, the recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, holding that Google is a monopolist and, therefore, should be punished by the government, is unwarranted and should be thrown out upon appeal. Google’s search engine is dominant because consumers believe it works better than the alternatives. Capitalism is the ultimate form of direct democracy, in which millions of consumers vote each day with their clicks. And those consumers are voting overwhelmingly to use Google’s search engine.
Full disclosure: I mostly use DuckDuckGo in protest of Google’s left-wing bias, but despite my aversion to Google’s politics, I find myself going back to use their one-hour search of recent documents to keep up to date on the news.
Most computer users continue to use Google even though I suspect about half of the country hates its politics. Even though Google’s attorney was recently forced to admit that the autocomplete tool for its search engine was excluding the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, the quality of Google searches still keeps many conservatives on board.
In a free society, people get to vote with their business and dollars every day for or against products and services. Nowhere is this choice more evident than on the internet, where a seemingly endless array of options is available with just the click of a mouse. And what do internet users overwhelmingly choose? Google’s search engine.
Google was not the first search engine. It entered a market dominated by larger players such as Yahoo and AltaVista. Google’s rise to prominence was due to its better algorithms and user experience, not any sort of “first mover” advantage.
Given its widespread popularity and the quality of its products, one would think the Justice Department would celebrate Google as a paradigm of consumer welfare. Instead, antitrust enforcers are doing everything in their power to punish Google for its success.
In its lawsuit, the DOJ accuses Google of being a monopolist and of using its monopoly power to maintain undue control over the market for online search and digital advertising. Unfortunately, the court sided with the DOJ, reiterating many of the government’s baseless accusations in its decision. How did the court reach this conclusion? By taking an overly narrow view of the “relevant market” in which Google operates.
The opinion holds that Google has monopoly power when it comes to “general search services and general search text ads,” but, by defining the relevant markets this narrowly, the court ignores a large number of Google’s actual competitors. For example, consumers often go straight to Amazon and Walmart to search for products they want to purchase, to Reddit and TikTok to search for digital content, to Yelp and OpenTable to search for user reviews, and to ChatGPT and other AI models to search for general information.
Yet the court explicitly excluded each of these competitors when defining the relevant market. As Kyle Abbott, a technology policy analyst with the Reason Foundation, explained, “The DOJ’s definition of the search engine market has little basis in how people actually use internet searches and ignores a variety of ways non-Google search tools have been integrated into other activities online.”
Google’s real competition is in the online advertising space. While the court confined Google’s relevant market to general search text ads, the company’s actual competition is with anyone selling online ads or legacy media ads. Advertisers have thousands of choices, and if Google’s ads are not priced competitively, advertisers will quickly switch to one of its many alternatives.
The court also relied heavily on the idea that Google maintains its dominant position by entering into agreements with companies such as Samsung and Apple to be the “out-of-the-box” default search option. The court assumes that users are unable or unwilling to shift from the default option. But alternatives exist, and switching is easy. In the market for online services, abundance of choice is never more than just a click or two away.
Furthermore, the assumptions on which the court relied are at odds with reality. When Europe mandated that Google adopt a “choice screen” that would allow users to choose between different search engines when initially setting up their device, it had virtually no impact on Google’s share of the search engine market. Users chose Google anyway.
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Even the court recognized that Google “has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions,” creating “the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.” Users flock to Google because of their high-quality offerings, not because of any agreements they have with product manufacturers.
Google has already announced that it will appeal this decision, so hopefully the appellate court will not make the same mistakes. Google’s success in the search engine market is due to its superior product, not any sort of monopolistic practices. Penalizing Google for its success is not just an attack on innovation and excellence, but an attack on capitalism itself. No matter how much I disagree with Google’s politics, I cannot help but admit that Google provides a quality product. And trust me, I have spent a long time searching.
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