Let's Keep It Simple, Leave Google Alone

In a pivotal antitrust case, the Department of Justice has decided to pursue a radical agenda: breaking-up Google. Judge Mehta is yet to pronounce the sentence, and Google will undoubtedly appeal. Regardless of the its resolution, the case is an astonishing display of the real motives of the antitrust persecutors. Let us assure you it is not a concern with free competition.
 
Central to Google’s case is the DOJ’s accusation that no competitor can overcome the supposed barriers to the web search market. Neither Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, nor a “well funded and exceptionally talented team” like Neeva–a failed AI search engine and a witness in the case–could challenge Google’s dominance.
 
At the same time though, bold start-ups like OpenAI or Andi are launching products with an explicit goal of “taking on Google,” and industry behemoths like TikTok and Amazon (dismissed by the court as operating in markets irrelevant to the case) are gradually chipping at Google’s market share in search ads, which is likely to drop below 50% in 2025 for the first time in a decade.
 
The future of web search, and Google, is anything but certain. Like any dominant company, Google must continuously earn and re-earn its position against both existing and potential competitors. Success is not assured; it has to be continuously sustained. Antitrust laws reject this reality, as they always have.
 
In 1992, a dissatisfied competitor sued Kodak for dominating the photographic film market. The Supreme Court accused Kodak of “locking in” customers by refusing to service equipment with parts bought elsewhere, allegedly stifling competition. The joke is that in less than a decade, digital photography made Kodak irrelevant.
 
Similarly, IBM faced 13 years! of litigation with the DOJ for allegedly thwarting competition. While narrowly focused on the case, both the government and IBM failed to notice the rise of PCs that rendered IBM obsolete.
 
Perhaps most well-known story is the US government’s dismantling of Standard Oil’s market dominance in home lighting. Nothing of the sort happened. In reality, it was Thomas Edison’s electric lightbulbs that replaced Rockefeller’s kerosene lamps in every home.
 
We could go on and on. Looking back, no alleged monopoly had a grip on the market. All had to continuously struggle earning their dominance, or fail. But antitrust enforcers consciously ignore anything beyond the range of the moment. Judge Mehta writes in his court opinion: “Google may have gained its initial dominance in the market competitively–through superior foresight or quality. But this case is not about [Google’s] initial acquisition of monopoly power,” evading the fact that Google rose to prominence through decades of value creation. He also notes that future challenges Google might face are “not relevant to the court’s assessment of the market realities today.”
 
The reality today, the court claims, is that Google has agreements with device makers like Apple and Samsung that presumably make competition impossible. Through these agreements (which were the core issue of the case) Google pays billions to be preloaded as the default search engine on smartphones and browsers. True, the court agrees, there is nothing in these agreements preventing “Apple and Mozilla [or others] from entering into limited distribution deals with rivals,” nor preventing users from freely navigating to “Google’s rivals through non-default search access points,” which some do. But because satisfied customers rarely take any effort to look for alternatives to Google, the judge deems its conduct illegal. “[I]n the hands of a smaller market participant it might be considered harmless, or even honestly industrial,” the judge says, but not in the case of a dominant firm like Google.
 
Neither the DOJ nor the judge care about how Google rose to prominence. Nor about Google’s and its partners rights and freedoms to deal with each other. They deny Google equality before the law. They ignore both the satisfied consumers, no harm to whom the court even attempts to claim (because there isn’t any to be found), and the numerous challenges to Google’s dominance it has to anticipate and deal with. What could be fueling such a blind crusade against Google’s success?
 
The sole force driving antitrust, now as ever, seems to be wishes, whether it’s envious wannabe competitors seeking unearned success, or bureaucrats dreaming of power to arbitrarily take from some and give to others. These whims are rooted in an egalitarian ideal which demands that nobody rises much higher than others, an ideal reachable exclusively by rejecting the causes of success and dragging down those who achieved it for the sake of those who haven’t.
 
The cause of Google’s dominance is its earned ability to pay billions to its partners for default status. If rivals want that status, they must figure out how to make something better and get the world to adopt it, exclusive agreements or not. Otherwise, justice demands leaving Google free to enjoy the fruits of its ingenuity.
 
But justice and liberty are not egalitarian concerns. Leveling down the successful is. To egalitarians, the very existence of a winner like Google is an injustice to less capable rivals like Bing, Yahoo, or Neeva. Since there are many who dream of success, the DOJ proposes breaking up Google and handing the search market–an industry Google practically invented–to its competitors on a silver platter.
 
Only a full rejection of the egalitarian ideal in economics, which means a complete abolition of antitrust laws, can stop the tyranny against the most successful and productive people in the world.