DOJ Files Long-Awaited Antitrust Suit Against Google

By Kate Cox, Ars Technica

20 October 20

Landmark suit is biggest tech antitrust action since US v. Microsoft in the 1990s.

he Department of Justice today filed a landmark antitrust suit against Google, alleging that the company behaved anticompetitively and unfairly pushed out rivals in its search businesses.

A company does not have to be a literal monopoly, with no available competition of any kind, to be in violation of antitrust law. The law is instead primarily concerned with what a company does to attain dominance and what it does with that dominant position once it's at the top. And according to the DOJ's complaint (PDF), Google did indeed abuse its outsized market power to tilt the playing field in its favor and keep potential rivals out.

"Google is the gateway to the Internet," Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said in a call with reporters. "It has maintained its power through exclusionary practices that are harmful to competition."

Google holds more than 80 percent of the market share in search across the board, with an even higher stake in the mobile search market, according to the DOJ suit. The company's dominance in search and the way it leverages its advertising business, its search business, the Chrome browser, and the Android operating system give the company gatekeeper status that it then uses unfairly to keep competitors out, the suit says. The suit also takes issue with the way Google Search is pre-loaded onto Android phones, from all device manufacturers and distributors, through an allegedly illegal tangle of exclusionary, interlocking contract agreements. The European Union fined Google more than $5 billion in 2018 over similar allegations.

As a result, the DOJ alleges, Google has "substantially" harmed competition by increasing barriers to entry for competitors who wish to offer or scale up their own search services. Its actions also had the effect of making Google's services worse: no competition means no "significant competitive pressure to improve" its own search or advertising products.

The attorneys general of 50 US states and territories also launched a joint investigation into Google's search and advertising practices last year. Eleven of those states—Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas, all led by Republican administrations—have signed on as plaintiffs in the federal suit.

Although the complaint focuses almost entirely on search, DOJ officials did not rule out the potential to add additional allegations or file a second suit later, saying that the DOJ's broad investigation into the effects of competition in the digital market is still ongoing and that Google remains one of the targets of that probe.

Rosen and other DOJ officials declined to discuss if Google might be broken up as a result of the suit, saying only that "nothing is off the table" and that specific remedies will be left to the court.