After a six-year-long antitrust lawsuit against Google, a US court declared that Alphabet, Google’s owner, has illegally monopolised the search market through exclusive deals with mobile handset makers. This is the biggest-ever win for anti-monopolism advocates after a similar award for Microsoft 23 years back.
Judge Amit Mehta, who delivered this verdict, said Alphabet paid $26 billion to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers, and effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market. This default position, the judge said, has allowed Google to build the most-used search engine in the world, which generated more than $300 billion in annual revenue through search ads.
Some analysts argue that the antitrust verdict would help smaller players have a pie in the online search market. Others, however, claim that the search giant’s market share in Europe had gone down by merely a percentage point after losing a similar case in a European Union court.
Every businessman aims to have monopoly over his market. Though it is understandable from the perspective of strengthening his business, it will have an adverse effect on competition and hinder innovation. With this verdict, the US court has hinted that big tech companies acquiring a dominant position through illegal means is not acceptable.
In spite of the antitrust verdict, Microsoft continued to dominate the desktop market. It is the second largest company in the United States with a market capitalisation of over $3 trillion, which is almost equal to the size of India’s economy. People shifted to Chrome for its better user interface and features in spite of Windows having Internet Explorer or Edge by default.
Anti-competitive practices by dominant companies are a global phenomenon, which cannot be fixed by lawsuits. A better option could be collecting an anti-monopolistic cess from dominant companies in each industry and using these funds as venture capital for promising start-ups, which will be a win-win scenario for the country.
