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Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets with the Polish Prime Minister at the Prime Minister’s Office in Warsaw, Poland, on March 29, 2022.
Mateusz Wlodarczyk | Noor Photo | Getty Images
A federal judge ruled on Monday Google Illegal monopoly in the two market areas of search and text advertising.
The landmark case, filed by the government in 2020, accused Google of maintaining its share of the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that maintained its dominance. The court ruled that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits monopolies.
The ruling is the first antitrust decision against a tech company in decades.
“Google is a monopoly and it has maintained its monopoly as a monopoly,” U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta wrote in the ruling.
The court focused on Google’s exclusive search arrangements on Android, and apple iPhone and iPad devices, saying they help entrench Google’s anticompetitive behavior and dominance in the search market.
The court said general search services apply to Google’s core search engine, an area where Google has traditionally competed with Yahoo. General search text ads are text ads that appear next to search results. The court ruled that Google has a monopoly in both areas. However, the ruling found that general search ads are not a market, so there is no monopoly control.
The court also declined to sanction Google for failing to preserve employee chat messages.
The Justice Department and a bipartisan group of attorneys general from 38 states and territories led by Colorado and Nebraska filed a similar but separate antitrust lawsuit against Google in 2020. The two lawsuits are being combined for pretrial purposes, such as discovery.
Alphabet shares fell more than 4% on Monday, weighed down by a broad sell-off in global stock markets.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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