(Yahoo) The bedrock of Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) empire sustained a major blow on Monday after a judge found its search and ad businesses violated antitrust law.
The ruling, made by the District of Columbia’s Judge Amit Mehta, sided with the US Justice Department and a group of states in a set of cases alleging the tech giant abused its dominance in online search.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his ruling.
The findings, if upheld, could outlaw contracts that for years all but assured Google’s dominance.
Google said it planned to appeal the decision, which it said “recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”
Judge Mehta ruled that Google violated antitrust law in the markets for “general search” and “general search text” ads, which are the ads that appear at the top of the search results page.
He said Google was not liable in the market for “search advertising” because it did not hold a monopoly there.
The decision is a huge win for the Justice Department and could have giant implications for some of the other big names in the tech world.
That’s because Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), and Meta (META) are defending themselves against a series of other federal- and state-led antitrust suits, some of which make similar claims.
The scrutiny is part of a wide-ranging effort by the Biden administration to rein in what it views as anticompetitive behavior across a number of industries, from healthcare to groceries to tech.
For Google, the judge’s decision affects a huge profit engine. In 2023, Google’s search advertising business generated more than $175 billion in revenue.
Coupled with Google’s YouTube ads and Google network revenue, both of which it promotes on its general search engine, advertising accounted for a staggering $237 billion of the company’s $307 billion in total revenue.
As of June 2023, Google controlled 91% of the global search engine market across all computing platforms, according to Statcounter. On mobile, Google’s market share was even higher at 95%.
Nearly four years ago, in October 2020, when the DOJ and states filed suit, Google’s annual revenue was $162 billion, roughly half of its most recently reported revenue for the year.
The Google decision comes after a two-month trial late last year that included testimony from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as executives from search market rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and DuckDuckGo.
The DOJ and 35 states, along with Guam, Puerto Rico. and the District of Columbia, accused Google in separate lawsuits of unfairly holding on to its market dominance in search, including search engines, search engine advertising, and search engine text advertising.
