Breaking news in the world of SEO: The Department of Justice has ruled that Google is indeed a monopoly.
Why Was Google Declared a Monopoly?
AP news reports, “A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle Innovation.”The ruling says that Google quote “enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search Services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices.”1
Google’s search engine processes 8.5 billion searches per day. However, a big part of the reason for its popularity is that Google is the default search engine that is pre-installed on many mobile devices. In 2021 alone, Google spent $26 billion to maintain these agreements.
What Was Google’s Response to the Ruling?
After indicating that it would appeal, Google mocked the decision, stating, “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”2
What Happens Next in this Case?
It is not yet known what the remedy to this situation will be; there will be an entirely separate phase of the court case that will decide that. However, it’s interesting how closely this coincides with last week’s news that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, are creating their own search engine called SearchGPT.
Between Google having to pull back in some way, shape, or form and OpenAI launching a search engine, this might be the biggest shake-up to the SEO industry since its inception. On the flipside, this may end up not affecting Google at all. The appeals process will effectively pause this decision for a very long time, and…
What’s a More Immediate Threat to Google’s Search Business?
Google is facing a much more immediate threat to its search dominance: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Of particular concern is OpenAI’s upcoming SearchGPT product. On top of that, existing competitor Bing and new competitor PerplexityAI are also in the AI arms race against Google.
A former Google employee, Arvind Jain, recently said: “I think for Google right now, AI (is) a much bigger deal than the ruling. AI is fundamentally changing how the search product also works.”3
Another former Google employee summed it up like this: “AI is going to move faster than the speed that DOJ can move against Google. The whole monopoly will be over, in other words, the speed at which AI will take over search.”4
By the time the legal system forces Google to change to improve the competitive landscape, it will already have transformed. This whole case is likely to be a moot point by then, perhaps with the exception of the contracts with manufacturers where Google pays tens of billions of dollars to be set as the default search engine on new phones.
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Sources for this article
- https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8 ↩︎
- https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8 ↩︎
- https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-is-bigger-threat-google-than-us-regulators-2024-08-08/ ↩︎
- https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-is-bigger-threat-google-than-us-regulators-2024-08-08/ ↩︎
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