The USA vs. Google

Today marks the beginning of a war that everyone’s seen coming.

The Department of Justice, along with eleven Republican state attorneys, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, a little-known business owned by a company called Alphabet. It’s the first in what’s widely expected to be a set of historic antitrust cases against the tech giants, which may threaten the dominance of these businesses as we know them today.

You can read it here.

Having briefly read the filing, the DoJ’s charge of the search engine exercising unlawful monopoly power has several facets, from the linguistic:

Google is so dominant that “Google” is not only a noun to identify the company and the Google search engine but also a verb that means to search the internet.

To the quantitative:

Google effectively owns or controls search distribution channels accounting for roughly 80 percent of the general search queries in the United States. Largely as a result of Google’s exclusionary agreements and anticompetitive conduct, Google in recent years has accounted for nearly 90 percent of all general-search-engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent of queries on mobile devices.

Expect ex-Alphavillain Kadhim Shubber, and the excellent tech team in San Francisco and London, to provide more colour in the coming hours, days, and weeks.

One thing is for sure: we don’t expect the Mountain View-based company to take this lightly.