Google says it won market share ‘fair and square’ through building a ‘superior search engine’.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has appealed a US federal judge’s ruling, which found the tech giant held an illegal monopoly in online search and search advertising, claiming it won market share “fair and square”.
The landmark case, brought forward by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2020, accused Google of abusing its market dominance by using anticompetitive tactics to block competitions and force advertisers to use its services.
In 2024, Washington District Court judge Amit Mehta agreed with the US government and ruled Google held an illegal monopoly in search as it had paid companies including Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to be the default search engine.
The judge also ruled Google held a monopoly in search text advertising as its exclusive contracts enabled the firm to impose higher prices for ads.
The tech giant has now officially submitted its appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, claiming the judge had not properly applied antitrust law in its findings.
“Google engaged in precisely the kind of procompetitive conduct antitrust law encourages – not the exclusionary conduct it condemns.” Alphabet stated in its appeal submission. “The district court’s contrary conclusion rests on multiple distinct legal errors, any one of which requires that the judgment be reversed.”
Google argues agreements were lawful
The company argued that its arrangements with device-makers and browser developers were not exclusive deals, therefore it did not prevent them from promoting rival search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing.
It highlighted the district court’s findings on these agreements were “lawful competition” and the “browser-makers – not Google – made the decision to have a single out-of-the-box default” search engine.
The tech firm said it “prevailed in the marketplace fair and square” by developing a “superior search engine through hard work, bold innovation, and shrewd business decisions”.
In the appeal document, Google has also claimed that judge Mehta’s decision to fix monopoly concerns by forcing it to share data with its competitors is “misconceived”.
It argued that by transferring its data to search engine rivals – including AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT – would mandate a “form of ersatz competition that would never have arisen in the real world and would do nothing to spur real innovation”.
The DOJ is expected to file papers making its own arguments in July.
If Google wins the appeal, it could overturn the order to share data to its competitors. If it loses, the company could then need to appeal to the US Supreme Court.
In a separate case, also brought by the DOJ, Google was also found to have a monopoly in advertising technology as it had manipulated key components of the online ad market – namely publisher ad servers and ad exchanges – to maintain its dominance.
A judge is expected to issue a decision on remedies for this, later this year.
In Europe, Google has been deemed a search monopoly by the CMA in the UK. In the EU, the tech giant could be hit with a multi-billion dollar penalty under the Digital Markets Act, for its search practices.
