(Reuters) – U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta on Monday ruled that Google had violated antitrust law by spending billions of dollars to secure exclusive agreements with developers, carriers and equipment makers to be the default search engine.
Here are some key statements the judge made in his 277-page ruling:
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
“Sure, users can access Google’s rivals by switching the default search access point or by downloading a rival search app or browser. But the market reality is that users rarely do so.”
“The default is extremely valuable real estate. Because many users simply stick to searching with the default, Google receives billions of queries every day through those access points.”
“Google, of course, recognizes that losing defaults would dramatically impact its bottom line. For instance, Google has projected that losing the Safari default would result in a significant drop in queries and billions of dollars in lost revenues.”
“The distribution agreements have caused a third key anticompetitive effect: They have reduced the incentive to invest and innovate in search.”
“There is no genuine ‘competition for the contract.’ Google has no true competitor.”
“Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions. The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.”
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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