Google Runs an Illegal Monopoly. What To Do About It?

Google is officially a monopoly.

The US Department of Justice came to this conclusion last week ending a landmark antitrust case. Google’s obscenely high market share and the $20bn it pays Apple annually to be the default search engine on Safari were the key elements of the trial. Now the problem is what to do about it.

The EU came first in sanctioning Google for its anti-competitive practices. Its recent Digital Markets Acts forced Google to let users choose their default search engine on Android phones. Some argue that the EU ruling did little harm to Google’s dominant position, and the same will be true for any enforcement following the US DoJ sentence.

Hard to disagree. However, something it is indeed changing.

Google search engine market share on desktop in Europe has declined consistently since 2022. According to Statcounter, it was 85.4% in January 2022 and 79.4% in July 2024. On mobile, the decline is less severe, but still visible. From 96.7% in January 2022 to 95.9% in July 2024. The same trend is seen in the US. From 79.8% in January 2022, to 74.2% in July 2024 on desktop. Bing is eating Google’s lunch, growing its market share from 12% in January 2022 to 18% in July 2024.

But in my opinion the biggest disruption is yet to be seen and will come from Ai search engines like Perplexity, You.com and soon SearchGPT.

OpenAi even partnered with Apple to power the native iPhone’s Ai capabilities, potentially jeopardising the multi-billion dollar deal between Google and Apple. If iPhone users will get all the answers natively from Apple Intelligence, why would they even use a search engine?

It could be that the DoJ won’t even need to take any action as new competitors are coming for Google already.

In any case, let’s never forget that American Big Tech companies are first of all an intelligence and power-holding asset for the US government. This is also why it took so long for regulators to even start looking into a potential Google’s monopoly.