Google has abused its monopoly status to stifle competition in the Internet search market.

So ruled Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday in a landmark case that may redefine how we use the web.

"The court concludes that Google has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by maintaining its monopoly in two product markets in the United States—general search services and general text advertising—through its exclusive distribution agreements," Judge Mehta wrote in his ruling.

Google currently accounts for some 90% of global Internet search traffic, a fact that in and of itself isn't illegal. Rather, it was revealed over the course of the trial brought by the Justice Department that tech behemoth had been paying Apple, Samsung, and other platforms to ensure that Google was the default search engine on those devices.

While Google has argued that this default setting can be readily changed by consumers, and that Google's dominance is a result of its superior product, Judge Mehta noted that "at every stage of the search process user data is a critical input that directly improves quality." In other words, Google has abused its dominance to ensure a positive feedback loop for its search product that blocks innovation from rivals.

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available. …As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use,” ,” Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in a statement according to NPR.

The ruling is the first major antitrust decision in the US since Microsoft in the late 1990s, and the first major case of the modern Internet. The comparisons between the two cases were not lost on Mehta.

“The end result here is not dissimilar from the Microsoft court’s conclusion as to the browser market….Just as the agreements in that case help[ed] keep usage of Navigator below the critical level necessary for Navigator or any other rival to pose a real threat to Microsoft’s monopoly, Google’s distribution agreements have constrained the query volumes of its rivals, thereby inoculating Google against any genuine competitive threat," Judge Mehta's ruling notes. The key irony here is that ruling against Microsoft 30 years ago paved the way for Google's meteoric growth.

As for what happens next, it's unclear. Will key parts of Alphabet's business be broken up? Will limitation be placed on the company? That is yet to be seen. But it stands to reason that the Internet may soon be changing in a foundational way.

“It’s hard to say at this point what the DOJ is going to seek and what the judge is going to accept,” Bill Baer, who formerly ran the antitrust division at both the FTC and DOJ, told CNBC. Though George Hay, a law professor at Cornell and a former member of the DOJ's antitrust division, told NPR he sees it more clearly: “The remedy here is pretty obvious. He's going to say those contracts with Apple and Samsung have to go away.”

More To Come

The Justice Department's case against Google is one of a few major antitrust cases it's filed, including those against Apple, Meta, and Amazon.

“This is the first significant monopolization case against one of the dominant digital companies — it’s super-important in that sense,” Nancy Rose, an MIT economist, explained to the New York Times.

This win thus gives the DOJ a momentum and a sort of precedent as it continues to prosecute Google's peers.

But Jef Pearlman at the USC Gould School of Law told the Los Angeles Times, says this case should work as a warning to AI companies building out their own search deals: "they will be thinking of this as they pen those deals.”

Verdict

No doubt this ruling will lead to two things—a change in the Internet search as we know it today, and a stronger hammer for the DOJ in its other antitrust cases. With both, legal departments should be planning for how these changes will begin to affect their own business.