A judge in the United States has ruled that Google spent billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly for its search engine, exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation.
Monday’s landmark decision that Google broke antitrust law marks the first major success for US authorities taking on the dominance of Big Tech, which has come under fire from across the political spectrum.
“The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling.
See, this is why the law is fundamentally useless and lawyers need to be [redacted]
I figured this shit out without even thinking about it, literally, you could have asked me this 20 years ago and I'd just be like
The right move would be to break them up. Separate all the business units that collude to abuse their monopoly power.
Knowing the recent history of US anti-trust, it'll drag on for years and the government will settle for a money judgement and an agreement to stop doing things that they don't need to do anymore.
I think the usual move when it's a somewhat natural monopoly, is to take action against some anti-competitive behaviour. So probably google won't be able to ask you to install chrome, and maybe something like search history and personalization would be forced to use SSOs other than googles? If they get more serious maybe there'll be a crackdown on how google prioritizes results.
