This week the Biden administration’s Department of Justice made clear their intentions for Google: destroy the most efficient search company in the world.
The premise for this decision was a federal court ruling last August in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google that Google was a monopolist in the market for general search services on the internet. Being a monopolist is, in itself, not an antitrust violation. The court, however, ruled that Google had maintained and expanded its market share by reason of it being the default search engine on its own Google’s Chrome browser and by inducing Apple to make Google the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser, in return for sharing its search advertising revenue with Apple. This left too little room for other search engines, like Microsoft’s Bing, in the court’s view.
