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Google broke law to maintain online search monopoly, US judge rules (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 months ago by MicroWave to c/economics

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Google violated antitrust laws as it built an internet search empire, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a decision that could have major implications for the way people interact with the internet.

Judge Amit Mehta found that Google violated section 2 of the Sherman Act, a US antitrust law. His decision states that Google maintained a monopoly over search services and advertising.

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The ruling is one of the largest antitrust decisions in decades, capping off a case that pitted the justice department against one of the world’s most valuable companies. It was also part of a broader push in recent years from the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, as well as European regulators, to scrutinize big tech companies for allegedly monopolistic practices.

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[–] toasteecup 1 points 3 months ago

Good. Now make em cry.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

One of the interesting outcomes of this could be that a lot of companies require new business models. As far as I can tell for example, opera's core business model is Google paying them to use Google as a search engine. Firefox also makes significant revenue from that practice as well. I believe some Linux distributions even take a cut as well as apple.

If the practice gets shut down I'd expect a lot of changes fast. Either the projects would have to shrink operations, reach out to users for support, find an alternative company to pay for search, or some combination of all three.

[–] 432 1 points 3 months ago

They need to be broken up into like 6 different companies like what happened to AT&T. Meta, too.