Justice Department Files Massive Antitrust Suit Against Google

The Department of Justice filed suit against Google on Tuesday, along with 11 state attorneys general, for controlling what the department said was an illegal monopoly on the online search and advertising industry.

Among other things, the complaint noted, Google requires mobile device providers to enter into exclusivity agreements that forbid them from offering preinstalled search services other than Google’s. In Apple’s case, Google also requires that its search engine come preinstalled on the Safari internet browser.

“Google has entered into a series of exclusionary agreements that collectively lock up the primary avenues through which users access search engines, and thus the internet, by requiring that Google be set as the preset default general search engine on billions of mobile devices and computers worldwide and, in many cases, prohibiting preinstallation of a competitor,” the department argued in a press release.

“The United States has only three general search engines that crawl the internet: Google, Bing, and, to a lesser extent, privacy-focused search provider DuckDuckGo,” DOJ said in its complaint. “DuckDuckGo combines search

results from different sources (including Bing) depending on the search query. A fourth general search engine, Yahoo!, does not currently crawl the internet and instead purchases search results from Bing.”

Nonetheless, the department noted, “Google in recent years has accounted for nearly 90 percent of all general-search-engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent of queries on mobile devices”

The suit comes after every state other than Alabama and California initiated a parallel antitrust investigation of the company in September 2019. The suit on Tuesday was joined by the attorneys general of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina. All are Republicans.

The political dynamic is a partial contrast from the one in Congress, where Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee — led by Chairman Jerrold Nadler (NY) — have argued in favor of more strictly regulating big tech companies over opposition from Republicans. “By controlling access to markets, these giants can pick winners and losers throughout our economy,” Nadler wrote in a report issued by committee Democrats earlier this month.

However, a bipartisan group of attorneys general in a handful of additional states — including Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, and New York — said in a joint statement that they may opt to join the case at a later date, after they have decided whether to pursue additional charges. “We plan to conclude parts of our investigation of Google in the coming weeks,” the group said. “If we decide to

file a complaint, we would file a motion to consolidate our case with the DOJ’s. We would then litigate the consolidated case cooperatively, much as we did in the Microsoft case.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who initiated an antitrust investigation of Google during his time as Missouri’s attorney general, praised the development in a statement after DOJ’s announcement.

“Today’s lawsuit is the most important antitrust case in a generation,” Hawley said. “Google and its fellow Big Tech monopolists exercise unprecedented power over the lives of ordinary Americans, controlling everything from the news we read to the security of our most personal information. And Google in particular has gathered and maintained that power through illegal means.”