The federal government needs to end its antitrust crusades.
The first case that should end is United States v. Google LLC. The case was brought by the United States Department of Justice on Oct. 20, 2020 in the final months of Trump’s first term and has been carried on aggressively by the outgoing Biden administration.
On Aug. 5 last year, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly” with its search engine, he wrote in his decision. On Nov. 20, the Justice Department asked Mehta to break up Google, in particular selling off its Chrome browser. Google already has appealed.
A second, separate antitrust case against Google resulting in a ruling that it must revamp its Google Play app store. Google is also appealing that case.
“We can unequivocally say that breaking up Google as the DOJ has proposed is unreasonable and nearly unprecedented in modern history,” Max Gulker, a senior policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, told us. He pointed to the breakup of the AT&T monopoly in the early 1980s. But that largely was a government-sustained monopoly.
Gulker also points to the DOJ’s antitrust suit of 25 years ago against Microsoft. That case centered on Microsoft “tying” its Internet Explorer browser into new copies of the dominant Windows operating system. In 2001 a deal was reached that didn’t break up Microsoft. But either way, the inclusion of Internet Explorer never really mattered. As we all saw in the years to come, different browsers and different systems blossomed to fill consumer needs and interests. The government didn’t need to get involved.
That’s the problem with antitrust, especially in tech: The technology quickly outruns the lawsuits. “Anti-tech crusaders have overused ‘monopoly’ to the point it’s meaningless,” Gulker said. While Google is no doubt the dominant force search, people have their options of existing alternatives, including Bing and DuckDuckGo. Who knows what will come in the future? Or how AI will shape how people search for content.
It must also be asked: So what if Google offers the dominant search engine? As Jennifer Huddleston of the Cato Institute noted back in 2023 about these cases, “Consumers choose Google largely because they consider it a better product, not because they have been manipulated into choosing it as their option for search.”
Gulker continued, “It’s no accident all the companies now known as ‘big tech’ are American companies,” because here they are “relatively free to innovate, experiment, grow, merge, and profit – certainly free relative to Europe.” China’s government also “tips the scales” toward favored firms. In China, indeed, Google’s market share is just 2.2% compared to the 56.2% of Baidu, a Chinese company, and 28.2% for Bing.
Because Silicon Valley is in California, Gulker said all these antitrust actions could hurt the state and its economy. That’s where our two Democratic U.S. Senators, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, will play a key role. Both sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee which next week begins confirmation hearings for Pam Bondi as the next attorney general. We encourage them to ask key questions on the need to end the antitrust attack on our crucial California high-tech companies in the midst of tough global competition.
