What Happened
For years, Google has been unstoppable and untouchable when it comes to the tech giants' hold on internet search - holding a staggering 90+% market share in the search engine space. However, nothing lasts forever, and suddenly a massive question mark hangs over the future of Google’s marketplace dominance. A federal judge ruled on August 5, 2024 that Google has violated US antitrust law specific to its search business and has been deemed a monopoly by their actions within internet search. The verdict was based on the company spending billions on exclusive contracts to lock in a dominant position within smartphones and web browsers, thus leading to alleged anticompetitive behavior. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, plans to appeal the ruling.
The last trial and negative ruling for a major corporation regarding monopolization was Microsoft in the early 2000s. They were accused similarly through default settings and technical restrictions of monopolizing the web browser space for Windows. After appeals, the US and Microsoft reached a settlement with Microsoft agreeing to modify some of their business practices.
More woes are likely to come for Google as there is a pending additional lawsuit brought by the current administration. This second lawsuit is regarding Google's advertising technology business, alleging they have used anticompetitive, exclusionary and unlawful conduct to hold a dominance in digital advertising technology. This further gives steam to bipartisan support on taking strong action against these types of practices and sending a message to other companies that these types of practices will not be tolerated.
Code3 POV: Why We Care
This could either reshape our industry in ways we haven’t seen before or have little impact - the future is unknown. What we do know is that Google is a longstanding utilized and trusted search engine globally and across all demographics that advertisers seek. Google search has been known to drive unparalleled low funnel performance and a foundation in many media strategies. Therefore, although it is still too early to know the exact impact of this decision, it does appear that there could be changes to either Google’s company infrastructure, consumer choice by removing default status and/or potential for adverse impact on Google’s effectiveness in performance.
What to Do Now
Code3 recommends monitoring the unfolding of the lead up to and the remedy trial to better understand the true implications to Google’s search business. It’s also critical to begin to investigate contingency plans. Advertisers have typically prioritized Google over other search engines (e.g. Bing even if they have a diversification strategy. Continuing to test and understand the impact of these competitor engines on campaigns and monitoring emerging consumer search/discovery behavior will be important as a proactive approach for any impact to Google.