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On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Google violated antitrust law and acted illegally in order to maintain its monopoly in online searches. There's just one glaring problem: Google isn't a monopoly—not even close.
In fact, there are over 30 other search engines in the world that are dedicated solely to search functionality, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Duck, Duck, Go. Additionally, websites like Amazon, TikTok, and Pinterest have placed increasing competition on Google in recent years as consumers have begun using these websites for all manner of searches, from products to DIY tutorials to medical advice.
The ruling marks the first antitrust decision in the modern tech era, and its implications could be far-reaching for our legal framework, our economy, and consumers.
In the case, the U.S. Justice Department argued that Google acted in an anti-competitive nature by securing agreements with companies like Apple and Samsung that ensured their browsers were auto-downloaded to their devices. They also argued that over 90 percent of web searches are conducted on Google's search engines.
In reality, consumers have always had the ability to download their preferred search engines to their phones or delete the apps that come pre-programed to their devices. In securing these deals, Google did not block other search engines from being accessible, nor did they force anyone to use their products. They just made them more convenient to access, which is a perfectly reasonable step for a business to take.
Google disputes the claim that 90 percent of web searches are done on their engines. But even if they were, the company's popularity indicates one thing and one thing alone: Consumers like Google products and want to use them. The company has in no way harmed consumers, defrauded anyone, or even acted in an unfair way toward their competition. Being smart enough to negotiate such deals simply makes Google better at its job.
For decades, antitrust law has hinged on conservative legal jurisprudence known as the consumer welfare standard. It's a very good legal precedent that defenders of capitalism and limited government worked hard to enshrine into law following a disastrous period of aggressive antitrust pursuits by the U.S. government in the 20th century that crippled our economy.
The consumer welfare standard says that in order to have breached antitrust law, three conditions must be met. The company in question must be a monopoly (an extreme rarity), it must have used its monopoly power, and it must have done so in a way that harms consumers. No serious person could argue Google crossed any one of these lines, much less all three.
Yet the case against Google is one of many the government has brought in recent years, many of which have come from the FTC under the aggressive and anti-capitalist reign of chair Lina Khan. Khan's agenda, which has been supported by the Biden administration and populists in both parties such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, seeks to overturn the consumer welfare standard and return our antitrust landscape to that of the mid-1900s. According to these types, a business being big means it is bad, rather than the obvious truth that a business becoming big merely means it is popular and offers a product or service consumers quite like. And their solution to "bad" big business is always the same: The government needs more control of the economy and private companies in order to "protect" consumers from these evil corporations.
But antitrust enthusiasts always tip their hand, revealing antitrust as a Trojan horse: The same people who openly hate capitalism are always claiming we need more of it in order to "save" capitalism. But capitalism doesn't need saving by the government, certainly not from monopolies. In a true free market, system failures come naturally and swiftly as better competitors emerge, products become outdated, or bloat takes over. Monopolies rarely exist at all and never for long under capitalism.
Despite the fact that our economy is more mixed than free market these days, supporters of antitrust are still hard-pressed to identify actual monopolies in existence. In fact, the only long-standing monopolies that come to mind are government created or backed (think the public school system or certificate of need laws that block the infusion of new healthcare suppliers).
Google lost its lawsuit, but the real losers are the American people. Not only could this decision prohibit Google from offering quality products millions of us enjoy, it also means it will be even harder for the next competitor to get their foot in the door.
Hannah Cox is the President and Co-Founder of BASEDPolitics. She works with Netchoice, a free-market trade organization for the tech industry.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
